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Bargari sacrilege: CBI closure report bad in law, indicates ‘hurry to give clean chit’, says Punjab AG
In a statement, Nanda said the CBI lost all authority and jurisdiction to continue with any investigation in the cases, much less to file a closure report, after the state government issued a formal notification to withdraw the cases from the agency in September 2018.
A day after chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh rejected the CBI closure report in the Bargari sacrilege case, Punjab advocate general Atul Nanda has termed the report as bad in law, claiming that the national agency had no jurisdiction in the matter after the state government withdrew the cases from it last year.
In a statement, Nanda said the CBI lost all authority and jurisdiction to continue with any investigation in the cases, much less to file a closure report, after the state government issued a formal notification to withdraw the cases from the agency in September 2018. Instead of filing the closure report, the correct legal course for the CBI would have been to inform the court that it was no longer charged with the investigation, he said.
The CBI had on July 4 filed the closure report in three cases of sacrilege — theft of a ‘bir’ of Guru Granth Sahib from a Burj Jawahar Singh Wala village on June 1, 2015, putting up of hand-written sacrilegious posters on September 25 and torn pages of ‘bir’ being found at Bargari on October 12 — against the three accused.
The report in the politically-sensitive cases, which were handed over to the CBI by the previous SAD-BJP government in November 2015, had unnerved the Congress government and it moved the court of the special judicial magistrate of CBI for a copy of the report. The government claimed that it was also “party and privy” to the probe, but the court rejected the government’s locus standi in the matter.
Nanda said he found the CBI’s decision to file the closure report, all of a sudden, to be “intriguing”, and said the move clearly indicated the agency’s hurry to give a clean chit to the accused persons in the cases. He also expressed surprise at the CBI’s stand that the state of Punjab was a stranger to the events, and thus not entitled to a copy of the closure report. This stand, he said, was absurd, considering that the agency itself had, in its closure report, cited the “reports” and “inputs” of the Punjab police.
Explaining the legal position in the matter, AG said that on September 6,, 2018, in line with a resolution of the House, the state government had passed a formal notification withdrawing these cases from the CBI. He further pointed out that this action was legally upheld by the high court of Punjab and Haryana in its judgment dated January 25, 2019, filed by some of the accused police officers.
Slug: Bargari sacrilege
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The national agency had no jurisdiction in the matter after the state government withdrew the cases from it last year
