Gurugram: A Panchkula court has acquitted an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) and eight others on charges of extorting Rs 40 lakh from a man who was allegedly threatened with a fake rape case. Additional District and Sessions Judge Bikramjit Aroura acquitted ACP Desh Bandhu, two Exempted Assistant Sub Inspectors (EASIs), a woman identified as Rajni alias Janvi, her husband Salim Ansari, and four others on 17 July.
The judge ruled that the prosecution had failed to establish the foundational charge in the case: the extortion.
The story begins in April 2015, when Rajni, using the fake name ‘Janvi’ on Facebook, got in touch with a man named Pranveer Saini. The two exchanged numbers, chatted on WhatsApp, and Rajni allegedly invited Saini to her rented flat at Army Flats in Panchkula’s Sector 27. The prosecution said the flat belonged to her husband, Salim Ansari, but was passed off to Saini as hers. On 22 May 2015, Saini visited the flat.
Rajni later told police she was given sweets laced with an intoxicant and that Saini raped her. An FIR was registered under Sections 328 (poisoning) and 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). That is where the case could have ended, but instead, it took a turn.
When ‘victim’ became accused
As investigators dug into call records, WhatsApp chats and visitor logs, the complainant’s version started to unravel. Salim Ansari’s claim that he was at a Skoda showroom in Chandigarh, or getting homoeopathic treatment in Ambala Cantt on the day of the alleged crime, did not hold up since his phone’s tower location placed him in Panchkula throughout.
Records also showed Rajni, her husband and his relatives were in constant contact with each other over the phone right through the period of the alleged “crime”. Investigators also found that soon after the FIR was filed, Salim Ansari and his brother, Hashim, allegedly reached out to Saini’s brother, Tek Chand, to settle the case in exchange for money.
Two others, Pawandeep and Vikram Chhikara, later told police they too had been lured by ‘Janvi’, then threatened with a false rape case. Police also found matching FIRs in Jagadhri (Haryana) and Nahan (Himachal Pradesh), pointing to what they said was an “organised honeytrap racket” built around fabricated rape complaints.
ACP enters the story
At this point, the case took an unusual turn. The prosecution alleged that one Ashwani Sahni alias Sunny Dewan approached Saini promising he could be shielded from arrest if he would pay Rs 40 lakh. It added that the deal was to be brokered through ACP Desh Bandhu, then Station House Officer (SHO) of Chandimandir police station. Two personnel posted at Ramgarh police post, EASIs Ramesh Kumar and Rajpal Singh, were accused of arranging meetings and ferrying messages between Saini’s side and ACP Desh Bandhu.
Call records showed frequent contact between Desh Bandhu and the other accused during this period.
One witness told the court he had accompanied Saini and Sunny Dewan to Panchkula, where Dewan went into Desh Bandhu’s office and came out saying the case could be “settled” for Rs 40-50 lakh. The witness also claimed that a plastic cooler was later delivered to the home of Desh Bandhu’s mother.
By the time an SIT formed by the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) finished its work, Desh Bandhu, the two EASIs and six others had been arrested, and two mobile phones seized from the ACP himself. The chargesheet accused all of them of running, or protecting, an extortion racket.
The rape charges against Saini were subsequently dropped after the investigation was transferred from Chandimandir police station to the Crime Against Women Cell and yet again to a Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the Deputy Commissioner.
Eleven years, and a case that came apart
The trial dragged on from the framing of charges in April 2018 to judgment in July 2026, with the prosecution examining close to 50 witnesses. And it was here that the case against Desh Bandhu, the two EASIs and the six others that had once looked airtight on paper began to fall apart in court. The cooler said to have landed at the home of Desh Bandhu’s mother, the judge noted, was never recovered. No purchase bill, no transport record, nothing to show it was ever delivered. No tainted money was ever traced to any accused.
There was no trap laid, no recovery of cash, nothing physically linking the ACP or the two EASIs to a bribe. The key witness on the alleged Rs 40-50 lakh demand, Madan Lal, told the court he had gone with Saini and Sunny Dewan to Panchkula, and that Dewan came out of Desh Bandhu’s office saying the case could be settled.
But the judge pointed out that this witness had not said any of this in his original statement to police back in 2015. It surfaced only later, in court. He also admitted he never personally heard any conversation between Desh Bandhu and Dewan. His account of the “demand” was based entirely on what Dewan told him afterwards.
The court said this is hearsay, which cannot prove a case on its own.
The WhatsApp chats, Facebook messages and audio recordings the police leaned on fared no better. Forensic experts could only say the voices on the recordings “probably” belonged to Saini and his brother. They could not definitively tie any of the accused to the conversations, and even the recordings themselves, the judge found, contained no explicit demand for money.
The call records showed that the accused had been in touch with each other on the phone, not what was said, and certainly not that a bribe was discussed.
Citing the Supreme Court’s 2023 Constitution Bench ruling in Neeraj Dutta versus State, the judge held that a corruption case cannot proceed without proof of an actual demand for a bribe. The court said that mere suspicion, phone contact or acquaintance with a public servant was not enough.
In this case, the court found that the necessary proof of a bribe was not present.
‘No more than suspicion’
In his 145-page order, Judge Aroura wrote that the evidence, taken individually or together, “creates no more than suspicion” and falls well short of what the law requires.
With the demand itself unproven, corruption charges against the ACP and the two EASIs collapsed, and with them the extortion and conspiracy charges against the rest, including Rajni and Salim Ansari, the two at the centre of the original rape complaint.
All nine accused—Salim Ansari, ACP Desh Bandhu, EASI Ramesh Kumar, EASI Rajpal Singh, Hasim Ansari, Rajni alias Janvi, Ashwani Sahni alias Sunny Dewan, Nazim Ansari and Subodh Pruthi alias Ashu—were acquitted of all charges, giving them the benefit of the doubt. Their bail bonds stand discharged, though the court has directed fresh personal bonds to remain in force for six months in case the state appeals.
For a case that began with a rape complaint, mutated into an alleged police corruption scandal, and ended 11 years on, in an acquittal, the judgment raises an uncomfortable question for the Haryana Police: how could a case built on so much digital and documentary material, CDRs, chats, forensic reports and disclosure statements, still not produce proof of an actual demand for the alleged bribe.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)