The ‘he-said he-said’ battle between CBI bosses moves to the apex court as the Government goes into damage-control mode
As the country’s top investigative agency is compromised by a never-ending power tussle amid corruption charges, and with the Government now drawn into the controversy by having to send the CBI chief and the second seniormost officer on leave to preserve the organisation's ‘integrity', the row over — and within — what was once India's premier investigative agency threatens to become the most sordid chapter in India’s institutional history. To top it all, it seems that the new interim chief of the CBI Nageshwara Rao also has a questionable career graph, having been accused of favouring some of those being investigated, and is, therefore, lacking credentials as a flagbearer of objectivity. That, at least, is the criticism.
Now, as all eyes are on the Supreme Court, which will on Friday hear on-leave CBI chief Alok Verma’s petition challenging his unceremonious ouster for going after his allegedly “corrupt” special director Rakesh Asthana and his allusions to the fact that he was being targeted because certain moves didn’t suit the Government, the festering wound is showing through the hastily wrapped bandage. The fact of the matter is that this in-your-face ugliness of charges and counter-charges, turf battles and political motivations, is only more visible today. Because the CBI has since its inception been a political tool for the Government of the day, each using the agency to pursue political and/or personal vendetta, upholding the power of coercion rather than of fair, impartial investigation, the idea of authority over truths. Though the Modi Government is under the scanner at the moment, as it should be given it is the ruling dispensation, the fact is that the dilution of the CBI’s independence had begun much earlier when the Congress, which is protesting loudest today, was in power. The threat of a CBI inquiry has long since been the ruling party's weapon to keep sundry Opposition and regional leaders in check. Offers of ordering a CBI probe have even been dangled to buy allegiance, particularly of regional parties. And whenever an honest, upright officer has gotten too close for comfort, s/he has routinely been told to “go slow” or, if adamant, simply shunted out. What seems to have changed is that earlier officers kept quiet, fearing professional ostracization and harm to their careers. Nowadays, they are speaking out more, some out of a sense of duty, others because they are politically-minded themselves.
The rot in the CBI, many observers feel, started showing last year when the agency went after its former director Ranjit Sinha for “scuttling” and “influencing” a probe into the coal block allocation cases by meeting the accused for one-on-one conversations. It even moved against its former director AP Singh as an “accused”, along with controversial meat exporter and suspected smuggler Moin Qureshi, to probe alleged corruption. In the ongoing Verma vs Asthana duel, both are under a cloud, the former having allegedly protected the accused in the Qureshi case and meddling in the crucial IRCTC scam and P Chidambaram cases and the latter alleged to be facilitating probes into Sterling Biotech and ensuring protection for BJP bigwigs. The CBI’s “politicised” template does not, however, mean that the present Government should not try to insist upon a modicum of propriety and be wary about its supervisory powers. It is now the unenviable task of the apex court, which in the past has termed CBI a “caged parrot”, to set it free and restore credibility.