Caged parrot or fearless eagle? India should give the Shastri formula a try

The Print

4 days ago

Readers may recall the previous column on the Santhanam Committee appointed by then-Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to look into all aspects of corruption among public servants. The present format of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) can be traced to his statement in the Lok Sabha on 23 January 1963: 'The CBI will investigate cases of corruption in which Central government servants are involved, cases in which the interests of any PSUs or any Statutory Body financed by the Government of India are involved, cases of fraud, cheating, embezzlement etc., relating to Public Joint stock companies, and also at the request of, or with the concurrence of states concerned, cases where organised gangs or professional criminals, having ramifications in several states are involved. The Bureau will describe statistics of all India importance relating to crime, conduct Police research including the analysis of trends and causes of crime, and make special studies of certain types of crimes having all India, or interstate ramifications or of crime having particular importance from the social point of view'.
The war ended, but the scourge of corruption did not. In fact, in 1946, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the interim Home Member, piloted a resolution in the Central Assembly for the creation of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act , thereby extending the scope to investigate corruption among central government employees anywhere in the country. The agency's administrative control moved from the War and Supply Department to the Home Ministry.
The Government of India Act of 1935 clearly listed public order and police, along with the PWD, agriculture, health, and education, as among the 54 subjects in the Provincial List. However, when the Second World War started in 1939, the War and Supply Department of India got an expansive mandate with a hitherto unprecedented budget. Suddenly, the department was inundated with complaints of corruption and nepotism. Following this, the government issued executive instructions in 1941 for the setting up of a Special Police Establishment (SPE) under this department to look into these complaints at Lahore — with Qurban Ali as the superintendent and Rai Bahadur Karam Chand Jain as the legal advisor. In 1942, officers and contractors associated with the railways were also brought within its domain. As the jurisdiction of the SPE was challenged in the High Court, the Imperial government notified Ordinance XXII of 1943 conferring legal sanction and authority to the establishment of a Special Police Establishment within the Department of War and Supply.
The original mandate of the CBI is now shared by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The BPR&D, established by the MHA in 1970, looks into the interface of law with practices on ground zero, technology upgrades, and best exemplars. The NCRB came up in 1986 with the core mission of collecting, analysing, and disseminating crime data across India. One month after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, in which about 170 people were killed across multiple locations in the city, the NIA was set up to probe terror attacks in any part of the country, covering offences including challenges to the country's sovereignty and integrity, bomb blasts, counterfeit currency, hijacking of aircraft and ships, and attacks on nuclear installations.
However, CBI continues to be India's nodal point for interaction with the Interpol on matters connected with global crime where inter-country collaboration is required. As things stand today, the CBI has a sanctioned strength of 7,295 personnel, and has field offices across the country.
Also read: From 'Jai Kisan' to CVC, Shastri walked the talk. But corruption proved harder to root out
The de facto control of the MHA
Since 1985, when the Department of Personnel and Training was carved out of the MHA, the CBI has been functioning under DoPT. After the directions of the Supreme Court in the Vineet Narain vs Union of India case of 1997, the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) Act of 2003 was amended to empower the Commission to review the progress relating to cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Additionally, the Supreme Court and the High Court also monitor the progress of specific cases. However, the de facto control of the CBI is firmly entrenched in the MHA, for it is the cadre controlling authority for the IPS, and Home Minsters have always had greater political heft than the ministers of personnel. The saving grace is that for quite some time — and now almost like a convention — the minister of state for personnel also has concurrent responsibilities in the PMO.
The agency has had its highs and lows. While it has been called a 'caged parrot' by the Supreme Court, it is also the soaring eagle which is called upon to investigate some of the most complex cases with manifold implications cutting across states, sectors, realtors, regulators, and political pressures. It has built its reputation as a premier crime investigation agency by securing prosecution in many high profile cases including the Harshad Mehta, Priyadarshini Mattoo, Sant Singh Chatwal, Purulia arms drop, the Harchand Singh Longowal, and the Tipu Sultan's sword and antiquities theft case. But many others like the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, 2G spectrum, coal block allocation, Arushi Talwar, and the Sunanda Pushkar case have remained unresolved, or resulted in acquittals.
The agency has also been accused of playing to the tune of the ruling party in the Centre. And in a reflection of the fractured polity of our times, several Opposition-ruled states — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Jharkhand, and Punjab— have withdrawn their 'prior general consent' to CBI for investigation required under Section 6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment (DSPE) Act, 1946. But perhaps the biggest damage to the agency was done by its own helmsmen — two of whom being AP Singh and Ranjit Sinha – who were the subject of the agency's investigation itself. In fact, AP Singh had to resign from the UPSC after allegations of his proximity to infamous meat exporter Moin Qureshi came to the fore. Ranjit Sinha's visitors' diary had names of many of the accused in the 2G scam. The Qureshi factor was also at play in the Ranjit Sinha case.
Also read: India can't fix food security with more grain alone. FCI at 60 needs a nutrition agenda
Books by CBI officers
One of the best ways of understanding the inner sinews of an organisation is to look at the books, published papers, and public interviews of the officers who have spent decades in it. This column has drawn from the works of five CBI officers — Shantonu Sen, AP Mukherji, Joginder Singh, RK Raghavan, and SK Datta. The one underlying theme in all of these is that the professional competence of this agency has often been sacrificed at the altar of political expediency.
Former CBI Director AP Mukherjee worked with three titanic leaders and wrote about his experiences with them in his book Unknown Facets of Rajiv Gandhi, Jyoti Basu, Indrajit Gupta. He enjoyed the confidence of all three, even though they came from three different political streams. While both Basu and Gupta were from the Left, the politics of CPM and CPI was often at odds. Mukherjee acknowledges that while Rajiv Gandhi — apparently — stood for a certain value-based politics, he turned a Nelson's eye to the diversion of funds from big ticket purchases like Bofors, Airbus, and HDW submarines for political activities, giving credence to the popular aphorism: there is no smoke without fire.
In his trilogy — CBI: Tales from The Big Eye, CBI Insider Speaks, and Corruption, CBI and I — Shantonu Sen ponders on whether the organisation he served for three decades was a 'fearless eagle', which it was intended to be, or a 'caged parrot' which it became when senior officers chose the 'proffered crumbs' to the 'independence of the skies'. As long as the cases did not impinge on the ruling dispensation of the day, there was functional autonomy. But if the PM, or for that matter the PMO, was involved, the agency was quick to take the necessary hint.
Joginder Singh, another former CBI director, was involved in the probe of many high profile cases including the 2G scam, and wrote 25 books some of which — including Corruption: A Threat to Indian Bureaucracy and Inside CBI — were a compilation of newspaper columns and public speeches delivered at various forums. He also wrote his autobiography Without Fear or Favour .
RK Raghavan's A Road Well Travelled documents some of the most high profile cases — Bofors scam, in which he acknowledged the support received by the agency from journalist Chitra Subramanian, Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the match-fixing scandal of 2000 involving cricketers Mohammed Azharuddin and Ajay Jadeja, and the SIT on the 2002 Gujarat riots in which the present Prime Minister was given a clean chit. Then we have SK Datta's CBI Top Cop Recalls in which he points to the political pressure on the CBI to go easy on Warren Anderson of the Union Carbide Corporation, Sajjan Singh in the anti-Sikh riot cases, and Sanjay Singh in the Syed Modi murder case .
Well, the message from these books is loud and clear. Exceptions apart, at the end of the day, for all the high claims of professionalism, the political leadership calls the shots, especially when Prime Ministers are critically dependent on the coalition dharma. While the damage may not be visible in the short run, nations which dent their institutional capacities run the risk of facing aggravated dangers — both external and internal. The CBI's crest has three words emblazoned on it — industry, impartiality, and integrity — and if the agency adopted these in letter and spirit, it would indeed live up to the ideals and expectations which Shastri had for this organisation.
This is the fifth article in a series on Lal Bahadur Shastri and the institutions he helped establish.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
Disclosure: The columnist is a trustee of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial (LBS Museum).
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)