CBI searches Mann's camp office and books his OSD in a corruption case

The CBI on Tuesday registered a corruption case against Rajbir Singh Ghuman, an officer on special duty to Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, and searched eight places, including House No. 50 in Chandigarh, the camp office allotted to Mann from the chief minister's pool. Ghuman had been staying there. Teams also searched his house in Gharachon in Sangrur, and places in Mohali, Gurdaspur, Ludhiana, Patiala and Jalandhar linked to the accused. Officers said they seized laptops, mobile phones and documents.

The Indian Express named the others in the case as alleged middleman Nitin Gohal, Jitin Gohal alias Raja, Romi Raja Mahajan, Bir Devinder, R.S. Nagra, and unknown public servants and private persons. The allegation, as the paper summarised the FIR, is that Ghuman and associates influenced postings of officers, including IAS and IPS officers, departmental proceedings, policy drafts, administrative approvals, tender conditions, licensing, land-use conversion, property disputes and revenue matters, in return for money. It is also alleged that drafts of orders and policies were passed to private persons before the government issued them.

The searches came a day after the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered a CBI investigation, and hours after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Punjab government's challenge to that order. The state filed a special leave petition around 2 a.m. The High Court order followed a public-interest petition by advocate Nikhil Saraf and a 200-page affidavit from the Enforcement Directorate. The ED's material grew out of letters to Punjab DGP Gaurav Yadav and from a money-laundering inquiry tied to fake consent letters for change of land use in a housing society. The ED had searched in May. The High Court recorded allegations of cash for transfers and cash for favourable orders. No sum is stated in the public summaries of the FIR.

Mann answered on social media. He said the BJP had started preparing for the Punjab elections, that a CBI raid had been conducted at his camp office, and that the ED and the CBI would be used to defame him and his government. He said the party was nervous because of the support his government was getting. The CBI has not, in the reports of Tuesday's searches, named Mann as an accused. The address searched is his camp office. The resident named in the FIR is his OSD.

The sequence is what makes Tuesday more than a routine search. An ED letter to a state police chief did not produce a state FIR. A PIL and a 200-page affidavit produced a High Court order on Monday. The state moved the Supreme Court overnight. The CBI registered its case and entered the camp office on Tuesday anyway, after the apex court had agreed to hear the challenge and before that challenge had been decided. The searches are therefore complete as a fact, and still exposed to whatever the Supreme Court does with the SLP.

Eight locations and a seizure list of laptops, phones and documents are the operational result. The political result is Mann's charge that the timing is electoral. Punjab's assembly election is the horizon he named. The court record is the horizon the CBI is using. Both can be true as descriptions of motive and of authority. Only the second is a basis for the case.

What is not yet public is a charge amount, a named IAS or IPS officer whose posting was sold, or a court order stopping the investigation. Until one of those appears, the story is the FIR, the camp-office search, and a challenge that has been listed but not heard.

House No. 50 is not the chief minister's official residence. It is a camp office from the chief minister's pool, and the FIR places Ghuman there as a resident. Searching it puts CBI officers inside a building allotted to Mann without placing Mann's name on the accused list published so far. That distinction is the one his post elides when he calls the action a raid on his camp office, and the one the agency's FIR preserves by naming the OSD and six others.

The ED path into the case is older than Monday's court order. Letters to the DGP, a May search, and a housing-society money-laundering inquiry about fake change-of-land-use consents are the file the High Court was shown. The 200-page affidavit is the volume of that file, not a finding. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the state's objection to handing the matter to the CBI. Until that hearing, the eight searches and the seized devices are the live record.