Chandigarh, May 16 -- The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday dismissed a bunch of pleas challenging framing of charges and summoning of some persons as additional accused, by a special CBI court in 2020, in the controversial Manesar land deal involving former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. With this order, the bench of justice Manjari Nehru Kaul has paved the way for resumption of trial, which was stayed in December 2020 by the high court, acting on the petitions from some bureaucrats and builders. Hooda, himself, had not challenged the trial court order. In December, 2020, the special CBI court, Panchkula had ordered framing of charges against 32 persons, including Hooda, a 1976-batch retired IAS officer and principal secretary to the former Congress CM, Murari Lal Tayal, former UPSC member Chhatar Singh; former principal secretary SS Dhillon and promoter of Gurugram-based real estate company ABW Builders, Atul Bansal. The trial court had also summoned former home secretary, Haryana, Rajeev Arora, who served as the managing director of HSIIDC between 2005 and 2012; former chief town planner, HSIIDC, Surjit Singh; former chief town planner of the town and country planning department, Dhare Singh; the then deputy superintendent, town and country planning, Kulwant Singh Lamba; and the then director, industries DR Dhingra as accused. It was this order, which was under challenge before the high court. The controversy dates back to 2004. The Haryana government issued a notification to acquire 912 acres of land under Section 4 (1) of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, on August 27, 2004, in Manesar, Lakhnaula and Naurangpur villages. Worried that this would reduce the value of their land, owners sold it at throwaway rates, resulting in a wrongful loss of Rs.1,500 crore, as per the CBI probe. On August 24, 2007, then director industries passed another order, releasing the land, in violation of government policy, in favour of the people who had bought the land, instead of the original landowners, CBI had alleged in its chargesheet. The central agency had started a probe in September 2015 and in 2018, it filed a chargesheet running into 80,000-pages against 34 people, including Hooda. In January this year, the CBI through its counsel Ravi Kamal Gupta had sought expeditious disposal of the case arguing that a stay has been in operation in favour of the accused persons for the last four years....