Bombay High Court sends Disha Salian's 2020 death to the CBI

The Bombay High Court on 2 September directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take over the inquiry into the death of Disha Salian, the celebrity manager who fell from a 14th-floor flat in Malad on 8 June 2020.

A Bench of Justices Sarang Kotwal and Ranjitsinha Raja Bhonsale told Mumbai police to hand every paper from Malvani police station to the CBI at once. The Joint Director of the CBI's Mumbai region must assign a senior officer. That officer is to register a first information report, record a statement from Disha's father, Satish Salian, and examine the full set of circumstances around the fall.

The court added a limit that matters as much as the transfer. No person is to be treated as an accused unless the investigating officer gathers enough material against that person. If the CBI finds no cognisable offence, it is to file a summary report. Satish Salian may challenge that report.

Six years on an accidental death report

Mumbai police registered an Accidental Death Report after the fall and later described the death as suicide. Disha was 28. She had worked as manager for the actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who died in Mumbai days later. Those two deaths produced years of public argument. They did not produce a criminal case on Disha's file.

Satish Salian petitioned the High Court last year. He alleged that his daughter was gang-raped and murdered. Those allegations have not been proved. They are the reason he asked for a central investigation. His counsel, Nilesh Ojha, told the Bench that the city police inquiry raised more questions than it answered and that the family had trouble obtaining the post-mortem papers on time.

The judges said, in court, that the father's claims might turn out true or false. They also said the police should have registered an FIR and given the family a closure they could test in court, given that the accidental-death inquiry ran for nearly five to six years. That observation is the legal core of the order. A long ADR is not a substitute for a charge-sheet or a formal closure.

What the CBI must now do

The agency starts with a paper mountain, not a fresh crime scene. The building, the flat, and the physical evidence of June 2020 are six years old. Witness memory has faded. Public commentary has layered names onto the file that the court has now forbidden the CBI to adopt as accused unless new material appears.

The order therefore does two things at once. It accepts that the local inquiry did not finish the job. It also tries to stop the transfer from becoming a vehicle for naming people in the press. The Bench told the officer to file a chargesheet as early as possible if a case exists, and to file closure papers if it does not.

Satish Salian told television cameras he was content with the direction and declined a longer statement. Counsel for the other side had argued that the petition was politically coloured. The court did not decide that question. It decided the process question: an FIR, a senior officer, the Malvani record, and a ban on premature accusation.

Why the transfer is not a finding of murder

Readers will see headlines that collapse the order into a conclusion. The text does not do that. The High Court has not held that Disha Salian was murdered. It has held that the existing inquiry failed to produce a result the family could accept or contest, and that a central agency should start again under ordinary criminal procedure.

That is a narrower, and more durable, point. Indian police files often sit for years as accidental-death reports when the family disputes the cause. Wednesday's order says that path has a limit. After six years of continued enquiry without an FIR, the High Court preferred a fresh statutory start to another round of the same file.

The CBI now has to do the work the city police did not complete. The first public test will be the FIR itself: which sections it cites, which facts it records, and whether it names anyone at all.