In a scathing rebuke of Punjab’s law enforcement, the Supreme Court has torn into the state’s police for its “shocking failure” to properly investigate a woman’s suspicious death, calling their approach neither fair nor just. The Court has now stepped in, directing the creation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) composed entirely of Punjab-cadre officers who have no personal or professional links to the state.
The directive came from a bench comprising Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh, who ordered the Punjab Director General of Police to assemble the SIT within one week. The team must include two IPS officers unaffiliated with the state and one woman officer ranked Deputy Superintendent or higher.
At the heart of the case lies a grim 2020 death in Gurdaspur. A woman, who had reportedly resisted pressure from a neighbor to leave her husband and marry him, was later found dead with visible injuries. A postmortem concluded she died an “unnatural death.”
Her husband—referred to as respondent no.2—did not file a First Information Report. It was the woman’s father who initiated a murder case. Initial suspicion fell on the neighbor and his mother, but the trail soon went cold. The husband was eventually arrested, and a chargesheet filed. Then came an abrupt twist: the probe was handed to the Crime Branch, which cleared him. He was released on bail by the High Court soon after.
The victim’s father challenged that bail in the Supreme Court and raised serious doubts about the credibility of the investigation. Back in 2021, the top court had asked for a status update—but got radio silence. Even now, the state counsel confessed to receiving the case file only the night before and sought another week.
Justice Kant, unimpressed, didn’t hold back: “What is happening in your state? This is an unnatural death… clearly a case of murder… and for how many years has it dragged on?”
Though the Supreme Court declined to overturn the bail order, it didn’t mince words on the handling of the case. It found the post-chargesheet transfer of investigation “strange” and emphasized that once a chargesheet is filed, further inquiry falls squarely under the court’s jurisdiction—not the police’s.
With the SIT now on the clock, the Supreme Court’s intervention may finally breathe new life into a case that the local machinery had all but buried.