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Manesar land deal: HC dismisses ex-CM Hooda’s plea to put off framing of charges
CBI counsel says petition dismissed as the stay of trial against co-accused can’t be ground to postpone trial against petitioner as well.
The Punjab and Haryana high court on Friday dismissed former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s plea, challenging the Panchkula special CBI court order to proceed with the framing of charges against him in the Manesar land deal case.
The former Haryana chief minister had sought quashing of the Panchkula CBI court’s September 19 order to dismiss his request for postponing the process of framing of charges.
The special court had fixed the date for the process of framing of charges from October 30. However, it could not be done as Hooda had challenged the trial court order in the high court on October 9.
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) counsel Ravi Kamal Gupta said that the petition had been dismissed observing that the stay of trial against the co-accused cannot be a ground to postpone the trial against the petitioner as well. Despite the stay, charges can be framed and evidence can be recorded.
The detailed order is awaited.
The controversy dates back to 2004. The Haryana government had issued a notification to acquire 912 acres under Section 4 (1) of the Land Acquisition Act on August 27, 2004, in Manesar, Lakhnaula and Naurangpur villages.
Worried that this would reduce the value of their land, owners sold it at throwaway rates, resulting in a wrongful loss of ₹1,500 crore, the CBI probe found.
On August 24, 2007, then director, industries, passed another order, releasing the land in violation of government policy in favour of the people who had bought the land instead of the original landowners, the CBI said in the chargesheet. The central agency started a probe in September 2015 and in 2018, it filed a chargesheet running into 80,000 pages against 34 people, including Hooda.
In May this year, the high court dismissed pleas from bureaucrats who were summoned to face trial. However, acting on the pleas from four former Haryana IAS officers, Rajeev Arora, Sudeep Singh Dhillon, Murari Lal Tayal and DR Dhingra, summoned by the CBI court, the Supreme Court had stayed proceedings against them on different occasions between May and July. It was this stay order, which Hooda had taken as ground for postponing proceedings to frame charges against him in view of the apex court order.
Hooda’s counsel and senior advocate RS Cheema had argued that the trial court’s decision to proceed against some accused, while proceedings were stayed by the Supreme Court for co-accused would amount to an illegal segregation or splitting up of the trial.
“The trial court rejected deferment of proceedings because the Supreme Court stay applied only to the accused who had filed a petition in the apex court and not the remaining accused,” Cheema said, adding that the reasoning was fallacious and should not be deemed a refusal for others.
“It is not understandable as to how the trial court would proceed... when the allegations against them are inseparable and interwoven, leaving no scope for segregation in any manner,” the petition read.
