New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned till Friday the hearing on the Punjab government’s plea seeking a stay on a high court order directing the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe corruption allegations against individuals linked to the Bhagwant Mann-led AAP dispensation.
A bench, comprising justice Dipankar Datta and justice Sheel Nagu, deferred the matter due to a delay in the physical file reaching the bench.
“We will have it tomorrow. The file hadn’t reached my brother judge (justice Nagu),” justice Datta observed orally during the brief hearing, where senior advocate Vikas Singh appeared for the Punjab government.
The state government moved the apex court on Monday against the Punjab and Haryana high court’s directive, issued on a petition filed by advocate Nikhil Saraf. The petitioner alleged cash-for-transfers and cash-for-favourable-policies schemes within the administration, contending that state authorities failed to act despite official communications sent by the Enforcement Directorate (ED). The high court ordered the state police and government to hand over all relevant documents to the CBI, directing the central agency to submit its probe report within two months.
Challenging the high court judgment, the Punjab government argued that the order erred by treating information shared under Section 66(2) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) as a mandatory direction to register a case—a stance it said directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the Vijay Madanlal Choudhary case.
The plea highlighted that ordering an FIR into public servants’ decisions on transfers, tenders, and policies without prior sanction violates Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act. Additionally, the state contended that despatching a central investigative agency into Punjab—where general consent under Section 6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act was withdrawn in November 2020—requires exceptional circumstances, which the high court failed to establish without finding the state’s Bureau of Investigation biased or incapable.
As an alternative remedy, the Punjab government has urged the top court to allow its own Bureau of Investigation to complete a preliminary inquiry within a court-stipulated timeframe and submit an action-taken report, while staying the high court’s observations in the interim.