Gurugram: A judicial officer posted at Mahindergarh, who told the Punjab and Haryana High Court that his wife’s alleged affair with another man had turned into a conspiracy to blackmail and defame him, has failed to get the case transferred to the CBI.
Justice Shalini Singh Nagpal dismissed the petition, ruling that the dispute was essentially a marital discord between two judicial officers and did not meet the strict legal threshold needed for a CBI transfer.
The petitioner, whose wife is also posted as a judicial officer in Haryana, had approached the High Court seeking transfer of investigation in an FIR registered on 27 June this year at Hisar Civil Lines police station under various sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita dealing with defamation and criminal intimidation.
His counsel, senior advocate R.S. Cheema, told the court that the petitioner’s wife had developed an intimate relationship with another man and, after he objected, the two allegedly plotted to harass and financially exploit him. The petitioner claimed the man paid off his family’s house help to spy on him, and later engineered a press conference at a Hisar hotel where journalists were allegedly paid to level fabricated allegations.
He also alleged that when he lodged his own complaint against his wife’s alleged partner, police took 37 days to register the FIR and left out several of his allegations.
He said the investigating officer did not seek police custody of the accused, skipped the bail hearing, and made no serious effort to trace the house help or collect evidence such as call records and CCTV footage.
Relying on Supreme Court rulings including the 2010 Constitution Bench judgement in State of West Bengal versus Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights and the more recent Himanshu Kumar versus State of Chhattisgarh, the petitioner argued that his case fell within the narrow category where courts have ordered CBI probes.
The court did not agree.
Justice Nagpal noted that the husband and wife, both judicial officers, had levelled serious allegations against each other, and that mere claims against the local police were not enough to justify handing the case to the CBI.
She observed that the investigating agency’s conduct could not be doubted merely because it sought judicial custody instead of police remand, or because the investigating officer was absent on the day of the bail hearing.
“There is no merit in the petition which is hereby dismissed,” the court ruled, adding that the investigation was still in progress and would be conducted fairly.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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