The stinging rebuke administered by a special court to the CBI on Thursday for fabricating material to chargesheet former telecom secretary Shyamal Ghosh and three telecom companies in the additional spectrum allocation case can further shake public confidence in a police organisation regarded as the country’s premier investigating agency. The court also concluded that the chargesheet filed suggested that “extraneous” considerations were at work, and has asked the CBI director to take action against the erring officials as per law. This goes well beyond being a stricture, and needs to be taken with due seriousness and a sense of responsibility by the CBI brass. In case the investigating body contemplates an appeal, it should carefully weigh the consequences of the special court’s order being upheld.
Not so long ago the Supreme Court had disdainfully called the CBI a “caged parrot”, meaning it took its cue from the government of the day in its work, and undertook to guide some of its more sensitive investigations at the time. Freeing the bird would mean that the police body should be set free to prosecute its responsibilities in an unfettered manner — essentially without fear or favour, and strictly in accordance with the law and the rules. Ideally speaking, this makes sense. The CBI should indeed be completely free in the operational sphere when working on a case assigned to it.
However, freedom of an unspecified kind for a police outfit does run the risk of making the country a police state. Therefore, while a case for the CBI’s reform is made out, the outlines of a reform proposal need careful consideration from the political, judicial, and specialist police point of view too. The states in India will also need to be brought on board as the CBI is frequently asked to take up matters relating to states when there is a feeling that state investigators may not be impartial. In the whole exercise the trick has to be to find the right balance in allowing the investigators operational autonomy from political interference while ensuring that a police organisation does not come to enjoy overweening powers which may be exploited to undermine constitutional offices, their office-bearers, and, in some sense, the constitutional scheme.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley has said that the CBI, in the case of Mr Ghosh, the former telecom secretary, and the three telecom companies, was under instruction from the telecom minister of the day, Kapil Sibal, to trap these entities for decisions taken during the term of the first NDA government. Needless to say, Mr Sibal has sought to strenuously deny such an imputation. None of this really matters, however, when the matter is before the judiciary.
