Two decades before the SupremeCourt of India crafted a sorry image of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) by likening it to a “caged parrot” in 2013, the agency’s shoddy handling of the hawala scam had invited a cutting remark from the judges in the early 1990s. Chief Justice J.S. Verma and Justices S.P. Barucha and S.C. Sen, who presided over the hawala case, had infamously said of the CBI on November 29, 1994, that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”.
The hawala scam, also known as the Jain diaries case, involved prominent Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other politicians of the time, including L.K. Advani and Sharad Yadav, who had been accused of receiving payments through hawala brokers or the Jain brothers. The apex court pulled up the CBI again on March 27, 1995, criticising it for allowing two of the accused, N.K. Jain and B.R. Jain, to abscond. “If this is the way the CBI conducts an investigation, we have to consider assigning this case to some other investigative agency,” it observed.
The alleged lapses and unfairness on the part of the CBI was a talking point during the rape and murder case of Priyadarshini Mattoo. Though the accused, Santosh Kumar Singh, son of a senior officer in the Indian Police Service, was acquitted on December 3, 1999, by Additional Sessions Judge G.P. Thareja, the latter reproached the CBI for allegedly fabricating and tampering with evidence. The court wondered whether the CBI “had negatively intended to help the accused”. Judge Thareja proclaimed that he had even considered whether the CBI should be “called upon to produce the evidence which had been kept away”. Priyadarshini Mattoo, a third-year law student, was found strangled to death at her South Delhi apartment on January 23, 1996. Singh was later convicted by the Delhi High Court.
The CBI’s stand in the Bhopal gas tragedy, too, has raised eyebrows time and again. In June 2010, CBI official B.R. Lall, who headed the investigation from April 1994 to July 1995, admitted in a television interview what was an open secret for many years: that the agency was asked not to press for the extradition of the prime accused, Warren Anderson, who headed the United States-based Union Carbide Corporation when the deadly gas leak occurred on the night of December 2-3, 1984, in Bhopal, killing 3,500 within days. “...Communication received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking us not to pursue extradition...he (Anderson) was the main culprit as far as we were concerned,” Lall said.
Between 1996 and 1997, the CBI’s functioning remained peppered with controversies. The Supreme Court took strong exception to the then CBI chief Joginder Singh’s hobnobbing with politicians involved in various cases. At the time, the fodder scam was in the full glare of the media and the agency created a storm when it announced its decision to file charges against the then Bihar Chief Minister, Lalu Prasad, well before the charge sheet had been filed. Singh was ultimately sacked. In the fodder scam (animal husbandry scam), the judges made no secret of their anguish at the pace of the investigation; they directed the CBI to speed it up.
St. Kitts case
In the St. Kitts case of 1990, the CBI was accused of trying to delay and defer the investigation. In his book Current Trends in Indian Politics , N.S. Gehlot said: “The CBI’s integrity and neutrality was deeply suspected in the St. Kitts case in which Ajeya Singh and his father, former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, were sought to be fraudulently implicated by several people including the former Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, and Chandraswami (alias Nemi Chand Jain). It was based on the preliminary verification report submitted by the CBI in 1990. The CBI was deliberately alleged to have delayed the investigation under the PMO’s pressure. It may be recalled that the first FIR in this case was filed in May 25, 1990, against a foreign account with $21 million with the First Trust Corporation Ltd, St. Kitts, but the investigation was deferred and delayed.”
In conflict-ridden Kashmir, the CBI’s conclusion in the 2009 Shopian rape and murder case led to an explosion of public outrage across the valley. On May 29-30, 2009, the bodies of two young women, Neelofar, aged 22, and her sister-in-law, Asiya, aged 17, were recovered from the Rambiara nallah at Bongam in Shopian. The villagers alleged that the victims had been raped and murdered by the armed forces. The one-man inquiry commission of retired Justice Muzaffar Jan, which probed the case, confirmed the rape and murder in its 300-page interim report submitted on June 21, 2009, to the then Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah. But when the CBI took over the investigation, it concluded that the women had drowned. The CBI also gave a clean chit to five police officials who had earlier been indicted by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the police.
Vijay Mallya’s escape
In the past decade, the CBI’s fairness has come into question on several occasions. Vijay Mallya’s escape from India is a telling example. On October 16, 2015, a Look Out Circular (LOC) was issued on the request of the CBI against the now-fugitive liquor baron, then in the news for defaulting on loans that he had procured from several banks. However, on November 24, 2015, the LOC was curiously downgraded from “block” to “inform”. This facilitated Mallya’s flight out of the country on March 2, 2016, before a court in Bengaluru was set to act against him.
Since then, the opposition Congress and the ruling BJP have been sparring over the fugitive businessman, accusing each other of being in close proximity to him. Ahead of the year-end Assembly elections in five States, Congress president Rahul Gandhi attempted to resurrect the controversy in public, tweeting on September 14 that “Mallya’s Great Escape was aided by the CBI quietly changing the ‘Detain’ notice for him, to ‘Inform’. The CBI reports directly to the PM. It is inconceivable that the CBI, in such a high profile, controversial case, would change a lookout notice without the approval of the PM”.
The CBI maintains that the case against Mallya was at a nascent stage when the revision in the LOC was done and that there was no detention order against him at that time.
The hushed-up transfer of senior CBI officer R.K. Dutta on November 29, 2016, apparently to deny him the command of the agency, is yet another episode that had the CBI pilloried in the press. Dutta was a natural claimant to the top post as the then CBI Director, Anil Sinha, was due for superannuation on December 2, 2016. Barely 48 hours before Sinha vacated the slot, Dutta received a fax message from the Department of Personnel and Training that he had been transferred to the Ministry of Home Affairs (Internal Security). Shockingly, Dutta did not receive any communication from the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), which is mandated by the apex court to act as a watchdog in matters pertaining to the appointment and removal of CBI officers. Dutta’s exit paved the way for the then Additional Director, CBI, Rakesh Asthana, to take over as the Acting Director of the agency. As controversy raged, the Union Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Jitendra Singh, explained that Dutta was inducted into the MHA “in the context of certain complex issues which emerged and required to be addressed urgently.” He said this in a letter dated December 7, 2016, addressed to Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, who had raised objections to Asthana’s elevation and had written to this effect to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 5, 2016.
Taking strong exception to the CVC’s silence, Dutta recently told the media:“A note had gone to the CVC that I was to be shifted from the CBI to the Home Ministry and CVC just followed the course. The CVC was supposed to look into the reasons for my shifting. The CVC’s role comes into play when someone is shifted or inducted. If someone is to be given extension in tenure or prematurely sent out of the CBI, the CVC again has a role. It cannot act in a mechanical manner. It needs to know whether there is something which warrants the removal of an officer.”
In 2014, the then CBI chief, Ranjit Sinha, got entangled in a major controversy when the Supreme Court admitted a public interest litigation (PIL) petition against him which alleged that Sinha had abused his office by meeting the accused in many cases at his residence. Following the petition, the Supreme Court asked Sinha in November that year to recuse himself from the 2G scam probe that was ongoing. Later, the CBI registered a criminal case against Sinha after the agency’s special director, M.L. Sharma, submitted a report at the behest of the Supreme Court.
The CBI is also seen by many as a vehicle that people in power use to daunt their adversaries. This awful practice was paraded in public during the Bansal family suicides of September 2016. On September 27, 2016, senior bureaucrat B.K. Bansal, former Director General of Corporate Affairs, and his son Yogesh, 31, were found dead at their residence in Madhu Vihar in East Delhi. The suicide notes left behind by them alleged in no uncertain terms that the CBI had been torturing and humiliating them while investigating a corruption case against Bansal, 60 years old at the time he ended his life. Only two months earlier, Bansal’s wife, Satyabala, and daughter Neha had committed suicide. In his suicide note, Bansal accused the CBI of forcing the two women of his family into taking the extreme step. He wrote that after he was arrested on July 16 that year, two CBI women officers had slapped his wife during a raid in their flat. He had also alleged that while he was in detention, the CBI’s Deputy Inspector General had threatened his wife and daughter over the phone that “they will be subjected to such a torture that they will ask for death but won’t get it”.
In July 2015, in what was seen as a case of vendetta politics, a 16-member CBI team raided the residence and office in Mumbai of Teesta Setalvad, the human rights activist who has been helping the Gujarat pogrom victims to seek justice. The CBI had registered a case against her and her organisation, Sabrang Communications, accusing her of receiving foreign funding in violation of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.
The CBI again courted bad press when it raided the then Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh’s residences in Delhi and Shimla in September 2015, on the day of his daughter’s marriage. The CBI was investigating a case of disproportionate assets against him during his tenure as Union Minister of Steel in the second United Progressive Alliance government. The Congress denounced the exercise as an attempt to destabilise Singh’s government.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE