The Central Bureau of Investigation has filed an FIR in the death of Disha Salian, former manager to actor Sushant Singh Rajput, naming Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray and actor Dino Morea, according to NDTV.
The filing follows a Bombay High Court order issued earlier this month directing the central agency to take over the probe. A separate report by India Today said actor Rhea Chakraborty also appears in the FIR. The document returns a long-pending celebrity death case to federal investigative scrutiny.
The judicial trigger
Salian's death in 2020 came days before Rajput's own death at his Mumbai apartment. Her family pressed for a central agency investigation, alleging local police did not examine all circumstances. The Bombay High Court accepted that submission and directed the CBI to register a case. That order, not any executive instruction, produced Monday's FIR. In India's federal criminal-procedure framework, a high court can hand a state police case to a central agency when it sees reason to doubt the local investigation.
For nearly six years, the case remained in local police hands. The family's petitions repeatedly asked for a central probe. That persistence produced the high court's intervention. A criminal investigation is not an opinion poll; the evidence alone should decide who, if anyone, faces trial. But when the persons named in an FIR include a former state minister and a public figure from the entertainment industry, the distinction between evidence and optics dissolves within hours.
The political charge
Thackeray has denied any connection to Salian's death, calling earlier accusations a political conspiracy against him and his party. Shiv Sena (UBT) has argued that central agencies are selectively used against the state's opposition leadership. Those allegations matter less for what they establish than for what they reveal about the room in which this investigation will run. A son of Uddhav Thackeray, Aaditya is among the most recognisable opposition figures in the state. The FIR does not charge him; it names him as a person whose role the court wants examined.
Morea has not commented on the FIR in the cited reports. Celebrity silence carries its own weight. When a case moves from a local police file to a central agency's FIR, everyone named in it acquires two identities: one in law, one in headline. The second spreads faster and sticks longer.
Chakraborty's name in the FIR draws the Salian case closer to the larger Rajput death investigation in public perception. The CBI has not said what role, if any, the named individuals had in Salian's death. A name in an FIR is a starting point, not a finding. The investigation must now close that distance.
The institutional line
A CBI case registered on a judicial order is ordinary criminal procedure. The agency does not need a state government's consent when a high court directs it under its constitutional powers. That independence cuts both ways. It protects the investigation from local political pressure, but it also places the agency's findings on a public stage few criminal investigations face. The question before the CBI is whether Salian's death was a suicide, as the initial police investigation concluded, or whether someone else bears criminal responsibility. The court has asked for a fresh look at the evidence, not a predetermined outcome.
Police in Maharashtra have investigated the case before. The CBI's entry does not erase those earlier records; it requires the agency to read them against the court's questions. Forensic findings, witness statements, call data records if any exist, and the circumstances of Salian's death all become part of a single judicial file. The high court's order signals that the state process had gaps wide enough to warrant a second look. That is the court's judgment, not a political slogan.
The CBI inherits not just a case file but a trust deficit. State police records have already been questioned by the family and by the court. The agency's first job is to determine what those records establish and what they left unexamined. That requires time, but not endless time. A central probe that runs for years without a charge sheet or closure report would deepen the same suspicion it was brought in to resolve.
Maharashtra's federal fault line
The state's politics have been shaped for years by friction between a ruling coalition and central institutions. Deaths with celebrity adjacency become proxies in that contest. When a central agency enters one such case, the opposition reads it as part of a pattern; the governing coalition points to the judiciary's independence as proof that process is working. Both claims can be true, and both can be wrong. What is not in dispute is that the Salian family's persistence, through petitions and public appeals, forced a judicial intervention that state authorities had not chosen to make.
The central agency's independence is strongest when its work is routine: when it collects documents, examines witnesses and files a report without leaks. Every leaked detail in a celebrity case travels faster than any court can correct. The CBI's discipline is as important as its legal power. The public will remember not the FIR's date but whether the agency looked only where the political winds pointed.
This case will not decide the next state election. But it will shape how voters read the institutions that operate between elections. A CBI that delivers a credible, court-compliant outcome, whatever it finds, strengthens the argument that India's federal criminal process can handle politically sensitive deaths without becoming an extension of any party's campaign. A CBI that leaks selectively or stalls will hand the opposition a sharper narrative than any speech.
A fair timeline
The CBI should now move on evidence, not on messaging. The court's direction to take over the probe is not a verdict on anyone named in the FIR; it is a procedural step that hands the case to a body with investigational resources the state police did not deploy to the satisfaction of the court. A transparent charge sheet filed before the political season would answer whether the central agency has found enough to proceed against anyone, and against whom. A long, silent probe would leave the names in the FIR suspended over the political calendar, which serves the rumour mill's interest alone.
What to take from this
Institutional credibility is built one contested case at a time. When a high court oversees a central agency's entry, the sequence matters: first the judicial order, then the FIR, then the investigation. Any reversal of that order would signal politics ahead of law. Maharashtra has seen too many high-profile deaths reduced to talking points; the only way to restore trust is to let the CBI complete its work and then publish the charge sheet or closure report. The names in the FIR are, for now, a list of people the court wants examined. Nothing more.
