CBI registers Disha Salian FIR after Bombay High Court order

The Central Bureau of Investigation registered an FIR on Monday in the 2020 death of Disha Salian, the former manager of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. The filing followed a 2 September order of the Bombay High Court on a petition by her father, Satish Salian, and followed a statement he recorded with the agency two days before the FIR.

Salian died on 8 June 2020 after a fall from the 12th floor of a building in Malad, Mumbai. Local police treated the death as suicide. The High Court criticised the Mumbai Police for not registering an FIR for six years and sent the matter to the CBI. It also directed that nobody be treated as an accused unless investigators later found sufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion on the material they collect.

That last sentence is the legal frame. Names in the papers this week are names whose roles the FIR says must be examined. They are not convictions and, on the court's instruction, they are not automatically accused persons.

What the FIR is said to contain

PTI, citing CBI officials, said the FIR does not name any individual as an accused, in line with the High Court order. It invokes Indian Penal Code sections on criminal conspiracy, gang rape, murder, causing disappearance of evidence, public servants disobeying the law to shield someone from punishment, and public servants framing incorrect records.

Advocate Nilesh Ojha, who represents Satish Salian, said the document lists people whose roles require investigation. Newsrooms that saw the text, or were briefed on it, reported that list as including Aaditya Thackeray, Rohan Roy, Dino Morea, Sooraj Pancholi, Rhea Chakraborty, Showik Chakraborty, former officer Sachin Vaze, former Mumbai commissioner Param Bir Singh, DCP Vishal Thakur, former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, former home minister Anil Deshmukh, and several police, forensic and medical officials. The FIR language quoted in The Print presents those names as the father's allegations transcribed into an investigation brief, including a claim of a false suicide story and of suppressed or fabricated records.

Those are allegations. The CBI will have to test them against the Malvani station papers, the post-mortem, the Kalina forensic file and whatever else the High Court has told it to collect. The agency had already written to Malvani police asking for the full record.

The political reply

NCP (SP) leader Supriya Sule said on Monday that she was surprised because the same Union government had earlier treated the matter as closed. The CBI had previously investigated Rajput's death and filed a closure report that cleared Rhea Chakraborty. This FIR is a separate case, opened under a High Court command, on a different death six years later.

Shiv Sena (UBT) has not accepted the father's account. The presence of Uddhav and Aaditya Thackeray on a list of people to be investigated will keep the file in the political argument about 2020 Mumbai, regardless of what the evidence later supports.

The only firm public facts on 14 September are procedural. The High Court ordered a CBI FIR. The father gave a statement. The agency registered a case under the sections above and, according to its own briefing, did not designate accused persons at the threshold. Everything else in the television debate is a claim that the investigation now has to prove or drop.