Narcotics bureau files FIR against Rhea, five others
Mumbai
The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) registered an FIR on Wednesday against deceased actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty, her brother Showik, talent manager Jaya Saha, Rajput’s former manager Shruti Modi, and one Gaurav Arya under sections 20, 22, 27 and 29 of the Narcotics Drugs and Pyschotropic Substances Act.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have already registered cases to probe the actor’s death. The narcotics FIR was filed after the Enforcement Directorate sent a letter to the NCB asking the agency to join the investigation.
NCB director Rakesh Asthana confirmed that an FIR was registered, saying, “We received a letter from the ED on Tuesday evening stating that during their probe into financial aspects they found that drugs were supplied to Rhea and Sushant. An NCB team will now conduct an inquiry and the people involved will be questioned.”
The NCB has been roped in by the ED to probe if drugs were supplied to Chakraborty and Rajput.
ED officials said during their questioning of Saha, Chakraborty’s talent manager, they found a conversation between the two about drugs. However, none of the three agencies provided any details of the drug in question or whether it was consumed by any of the people involved in the case.
Chakraborty’s lawyer Satish Maneshinde said, “Rhea has never consumed drugs in her lifetime ever. She’s ready for a blood test any time.”
The ED has again called Saha to its south Mumbai office for questioning. Meanwhile, on the sixth day of its probe, the CBI continued to question the late actor’s cook Neeraj Singh, and roommate and creative manager Siddharth Pithani.
Rajput was found hanging at his Mumbai apartment on June 14 in what police said appeared to be an open-and-shut case of suicide. The post-mortem report ruled out any foul play. After a two-week quiet, a political controversy erupted over the death, as a Bihar police team constituted to probe the case on a complaint by the actor’s family alleged it got no cooperation from its Mumbai counterpart.
The jurisdictional turf war spilled into the legal arena as the Supreme Court was approached to decide if CBI could investigate the matter. The issue became deeply acrimonious and divisive at multiple levels — between the Rajput and Chakraborty families, between the actors’ respective sets of fans, between the governments of the two states in question, and between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its former ally Shiv Sena — and left the entertainment industry split vertically.
Section 20 of the NDPS Act invoked in the case prescribes punishment for anyone who cultivates, produces, manufactures, possesses, sells, purchases, transports, imports inter-state, exports inter-state or uses cannabis. Section 20 (ii) (a) states that a person found with small quantity can be punished with rigorous imprisonment for a term up to six months, or with fine, which may extend to Rs 10,000 or with both.
Section 20 (ii) (b) prescribes rigorous imprisonment which may extend to 10 years and with a fine which may extend to Rs 1 lakh when a person is found with cannabis which is lesser in quantity than commercial quantity but greater than small quantity.
Section 20 (ii) (c) prescribes a punishment for commercial quantity where a person can be sentenced to rigorous imprisonment which shall not be less than 10 years and may extend to 20 years and shall be liable for a fine not less than Rs 1 lakh which may extend to Rs 2 lakh.
The case, which initially triggered a raging debate in and about the industry, devolving into a war of words and allegations between two camps largely made up of “insiders” (with generational links to Bollywood) and “outsiders” (first-generation actors and filmmakers), has taken more serious twists with charges of, first, money-laundering and, now, drug peddling brought in.