Disha Salian: The Case That Was Never Really Investigated

On 2 September 2026, the Bombay High Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the death of Disha Salian, the young celebrity manager who died in Mumbai in June 2020. For her father, Satish Salian, the order was the end of a six-year wait. Standing outside court, he told reporters he had not shed a single tear in all those years, not even on the day his daughter died, and that only now the tears had come. 

The Mumbai Police had closed the Disha Salian case long ago as a case of suicide. If the official version was right, why did it take six years and a High Court order to have it investigated properly? And when you go through how the case was handled, why does so much of it fail to add up? 

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Who Was Disha Salian, and the Night That Raised Questions

Disha Salian was twenty-eight. She worked as a celebrity talent manager in Mumbai, handling the schedules, contracts and public lives of well-known names, and had worked with the actor Sushant Singh Rajput, the comedian Bharti Singh and the actor Varun Sharma, among others. People who knew her described her as focused and good at her job. She was engaged and about to be married.

On the night of 8 June 2020, she was at a flat in a residential building in Malad, in Mumbai's western suburbs, with her fiancé and friends. At some point that night she fell from a high floor and died. The Mumbai Police registered an Accidental Death Report, which is a file that is opened when a death is not yet a criminal case. Over time the police leaned towards suicide.

The first questions surface right there. An ambulance driver named Pankaj, who has spoken publicly, says he was called to the building by the Mumbai police at around 1.45 am and reached within ten minutes, only to be told the body had already been taken away in a private vehicle and that he was no longer needed. When someone dies falling from a building, the scene is secured and the body is moved through proper channels. His account, if accurate, suggests the very first handling of Disha's death did not follow that process.

There are questions too about where that private car went. According to reports, it moved from Evershine Nursing Home to Tunga Hospital and only then to Shatabdi Hospital, where Disha was declared dead. The police have an answer. In an affidavit before the High Court they said private hospitals had refused to admit her, which is why she was taken from one to the next before reaching a government hospital, and that this was June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when many hospitals were turning patients away. The route can be read as the chaos of a difficult night, or as a delay that still needs explaining. Either way, it is exactly the kind of question a proper investigation should have settled years ago.

A Case That Was Closed, but Never Investigated

The paperwork is where the pattern becomes hard to ignore. Disha died in the early hours of 8 to 9 June, but the post-mortem was conducted only on 11 June, a gap of roughly two days when such an autopsy is usually done within twenty-four hours. No clear public explanation for the delay has ever been given. The report recorded a serious head injury and multiple injuries, attributed the death to the fall, and did not record torture or sexual assault. So on paper the forensic finding supported a fall. Yet Disha Salian's own father says the police did not hand him a copy of that post-mortem report for about five years, releasing it only after he went to the High Court to demand it.

The inquiry itself never cleanly ended. According to the state's submissions, the Accidental Death Report was closed in October 2020, and a closure report in early 2021 described Disha as having been under stress for personal reasons. But the matter kept going. In December 2023 the state set up a Special Investigation Team, which never made its findings public. A further report was submitted in April 2026 and accepted in May, and still did not change the original conclusion. At no point in all those years did the police register an FIR. Across several hearings, judges of the Bombay High Court asked why, after so long, this remained only an accidental-death inquiry, noting that all that needed establishing was whether the death was suicide or culpable homicide, and that the case papers had not reached the family even five years on.

The court's own order records forensic discrepancies that deepen the unease. The post-mortem said vaginal and anal swabs were taken, but the forensic laboratory found only smears on slides, a weaker kind of sample. The medical officer later explained that only smears had been taken and that the word "swab" was written by mistake. The laboratory reported that no male DNA was found on those slides. In a case built around allegations of sexual assault, the difference between a swab and a smear, and how those samples were handled, is not a mere technicality. The judges also questioned the prosecutor about the panchnama, the on-scene record, which stated that Disha Salian's body had no clothes on it, a point her family says does not match photographs of her. These are contradictions in the official record that a judge felt the need to raise in open court.

Also Read:  Post Mortem Horror: Noida Facility Brims with Rotting Dead Bodies

The Politics, the Sushant Link, and What the CBI Must Now Answer

The loudest part of the Disha Salian case is also the part where it is easiest to be misled. In 2025, Satish Salian filed a fresh petition and a police complaint alleging that his daughter had not died by suicide but had been gangraped and murdered, followed by a cover-up. His complaint named several people, including the Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, along with figures from the film industry and the police. These are allegations, unproven in any court. Those named have denied any involvement, and Thackeray has called the matter politically motivated and said he will answer it in court. When it ordered the probe, the High Court itself cautioned that no one is to be treated as an accused unless the investigation finds material against them.

The politics are unavoidable, because the case has shifted with power. Disha died under one government in Maharashtra and the case was revived loudly after a rival government took charge, and it has since been used as a weapon between parties. There is also a part that often gets left out. In 2020, it was Disha's own parents who pushed back against the murder rumours, publicly calling it a suicide and asking politicians to stop exploiting their daughter's death. Only in 2025 did Satish Salian reverse his position. However, a father changing his mind does not, by itself, explain a body moved in a private car, a two-day delay before the autopsy, a report withheld for five years, or an inquiry that ran for years and produced nothing.

Underneath all of it is the reason the case never stayed small. Six days after Disha died, Sushant Singh Rajput, the actor she had once worked for, was found dead at his Bandra home. Two deaths, linked by work and days apart, turned a local case into a national one and fed years of theories. It is worth stating plainly that the CBI, which investigated Sushant's death, concluded it was suicide and found no foul play, so the connection is one of timing and public suspicion, not proven fact. But the proximity was enough to make people ask whether the Disha Salian case had ever been examined carefully, and on the record, the answer was that it had not.

That is what makes the 2 September 2026 order matter. In Satish Salian versus State of Maharashtra, Writ Petition 1612 of 2025, the Bombay High Court handed the case to the CBI, directing it to register an FIR, appoint a senior officer, record the father's statement and take over all records from the local police. If it finds a crime, it files charges. If it does not, it must say so formally, and the family may challenge that. The court did not hold that Disha was killed. What it decided was that the questions, and the way the case was handled, were serious enough that the original conclusion could not simply be left to stand.

So the truth of what happened to Disha Salian is still not established. What is clear is that for six years the case was never properly investigated, and that has now changed, at least on paper. Whether the CBI gets to the truth is another matter. It is an agency often accused of bending to the politics of the day, and this case has changed shape each time the government has.