Contentious record

The wrangling within the CBI may have come out for the first time, but controversy is not new to this premier investigative body.

TWO DECADES BEFORE THE SUPREME Court 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 Statesbased 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