Punjab and Haryana High Court tells the CBI to open a case on Mann's office

The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Monday told the Central Bureau of Investigation to register a criminal case on allegations of cash for transfers, cash for favourable policies and cash for tenders linked to the office of Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann. Chief Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Justice Rohit Kapoor read the order in open court. They gave the CBI two months to file a status report, and they told the Punjab government and the state police to give the central agency full help.

The allegations reached the court through a public interest petition. Counsel told the bench that the Enforcement Directorate had written three letters to the Punjab director general of police and that the state police had not acted on them. The letters, the court was told, grew out of material seized in a money-laundering inquiry into land allotments by the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority. In that material, a private individual named Nitin Gohal is described as an intermediary for Rajbir Singh Ghuman, the officer on special duty to Mann. The petition treats Ghuman as the channel. It does not, in the account given in court on Monday, produce a recorded payment to the chief minister himself.

What the bench has and has not ordered

A direction to register a case is not a finding. The bench has said the CBI must open a file, use the ED letters as a starting point, and come back in two months. It has also said the state may not withhold cooperation. That second limb is the operational one. A state police force that has already left three ED letters unanswered is now under an order to assist the agency those letters were meant to prod. The DGP's office loses the option of filing the correspondence and waiting.

The chief minister's office has a political reply available, and the state government has already signalled it will test the order. Reports on Tuesday said Punjab would move the Supreme Court against the high court's direction for a CBI probe. If that petition is filed, the two-month status report and the appeal will run together. A stay, if granted, pauses the registration. A refusal leaves the CBI free to proceed while the appeal is heard.

GMADA is the file underneath

The ED's money-laundering case is about land allotted by GMADA, the agency that parcels plots on the edge of Chandigarh in Mohali. Allotment files are where intermediaries show up, because a plot has a price, a queue and a discretion. The high court has not tried the allotments. It has treated the ED's description of Gohal and Ghuman as enough to justify a criminal investigation by a central agency, given that the state police had the letters and had not converted them into a case. That is a judgment about investigative failure, not about guilt.

Ghuman is the named officer. An OSD sits in the chief minister's room and handles the traffic a minister does not want on his own desk: appointments, files, callers. An allegation that an OSD sold transfers and tenders is an allegation about that traffic. Transfers of police and civil officers, and the award of tenders, are two of the currencies a state government actually controls. The petition lists both, plus policy. The court has sent all three to the CBI rather than picking one.

A two-month clock

Two months from Monday is early December. By then the CBI must say what it has registered and how far it has gone, unless a higher court stops the clock. The state's cooperation order means the DGP cannot answer a CBI notice with silence of the kind the ED letters received. For Mann, the exposure is the office rather than a named personal charge in the material described so far. For Ghuman, the exposure is direct: he is the officer the ED's letter identifies, and he is the officer the high court has now placed inside a CBI case that does not yet exist only because the paperwork has not been stamped. It will be stamped unless the Supreme Court says otherwise.