Swachh CBI?

Impartiality and use of the CBI in high-profile cases has long been questioned, but now with doubts cast on the integrity of two of its former Directors even the firm believers in the premier investigating agency’s neutrality may be forced to have a rethink. Ranjit Sinha was enjoying post-retirement days when one day this January the Supreme Court gave him a nasty shock by ordering the CBI to interrogate him over charges of tampering with investigations in the coal scam. Sadly, none in the CBI or the larger executive had cared to proceed against him. Coming from the country’s top court the order itself is an indictment of the top-ranking officer.  

The country’s innocents were still trying to come to terms with the ugly reality about the CBI when more damning news came. AP Singh, who was the CBI Director between 2010 and 2012, has been booked in a case of corruption involving a meat exporter, Moin Akhtar Qureshi. Though Qureshi has earned notoriety as a middleman for several public servants, only AP Singh has been caught in the act as he, throwing caution to the wind, interacted frequently with the man under watch for laundering ill-gotten wealth of some of the rich and the powerful of the country. AP Singh was instrumental in the arrest of A Raja, Suresh Kalmadi and several corporate and public servants in the 2G and CWG scams. 

Whether the cases of two former CBI Directors constitute the tip of the iceberg or are exceptions in an otherwise clean system should better be left to individual interpretation but these partly confirm the common suspicion that corrupt politicians, corporate honchos and civil servants drawn from the Central and state investigation agencies, the bureaucracy and the judiciary milk the system and deploy black money abroad through middlemen like Qureshi. The honest ones seem powerless to stop them. Rather they lend legitimacy to the corrupt and maintain the public faith in governance. When cases drag or acquittals happen in cases involving the high and mighty, the systemic functioning comes into question. The Sinha-Singh cases have brought the rot in the CBI out in the open.