A special CBI court in Panchkula on Friday formally discharged former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Associated Journals Limited (AJL) from a 2005 prime institutional plot re-allotment case.
Following the discharge in the primary CBI case, special judge Rajeev Goyal also closed the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) money-laundering complaint against the accused.
Hooda, 78, appeared in person during the proceedings, which effectively terminate a decade of litigation involving allegations of corruption, cheating, and criminal conspiracy.
The court’s decision follows a February 25 ruling by the Punjab and Haryana high court, which set aside a 2021 order that had originally framed charges against the petitioners.
Justice Tribhuvan Dahiya of the high court had observed that there were no sufficient grounds to proceed with a criminal trial, noting that the prosecution failed to establish a prima facie case of “dishonest intention or wrongful gain.” Under the legal precedent established by the Supreme Court in the Vijay Madanlal Choudhary case, an ED complaint cannot survive if the accused is discharged in the predicate offense investigated by the CBI.
The case originated from the 2005 re-allotment of Institutional Plot No. C-17 in Sector 6, Panchkula. The 3,360-square-metre plot, originally allotted to AJL in 1982 for the publication of the Navjivan newspaper, had been resumed by the government in 1992 after the company failed to complete construction. Upon assuming office in 2005, the Hooda-led government re-allotted the land to AJL at the original 1982 rates of approximately ₹69.39 lakh.
In 2016, following a change in state government, the CBI registered an FIR alleging the plot’s actual market value was nearly ₹65 crore and that the re-allotment bypassed the recommendations of senior bureaucrats.
In clearing the accused, the judiciary noted that the re-allotment decision was unanimously ratified by the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) in 2006 and had never been declared illegal by any administrative or civil body. The court highlighted that government auditors had long ago dropped their objections regarding financial loss to the state.
The high court had been sharply critical of the CBI’s pursuit of the case, describing the continuation of the trial as an “abuse of the process of the court.”
Reacting to the final discharge, Hooda said that the ruling vindicates his long-standing position that the cases were politically motivated and lacked any factual basis.
