Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana has warned India’s premier investigative agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), that its aura of reverence has grown dull.
The agency is under “deep public scrutiny”. Its “actions and inactions” have raised questions about its credibility. The public clamour in courts for a CBI investigation — once a byword for impartiality — is losing reverberance, and will die unless the agency breaks its “nexus” with the political executive, the top judge said.
SIT preferred
Recently, a Bench led by the CJI did not hand over the Lakhimpur Kheri case to the CBI, opting to form its own Special Investigation Team. The Supreme Court had once famously described the CBI as a “caged parrot”.
The erosion of faith in the Supreme Court and the High Courts, voiced by the CJI, may dent the image of the CBI, considering the fact that the higher judiciary can use its extraordinary powers to bypass state consent and transfer an investigation from the police to CBI to ensure justice is done and seen to be done.
The CJI’s advice to agencies like the CBI to snap ties with their "political masters" or lose credibility echoes a Madras High Court judgment of August last year which forensically investigated the reasons behind why the CBI is its "master’s voice”. The August 2021 judgment of the High Court (HC) narrows the reasons down to two — lack of resources and lack of autonomy. The High Court Division Bench led by Justice (now retired) N. Kirubakaran said its judicial exercise was “an attempt to release the caged parrot”.
HC judgment
In its 32-page judgment, the HC pointed out that though CBI has a 60% conviction rate and has investigated numerous sensitive cases of larger ramifications from the Jain Hawala Scandal to the Bofors scam to Bhopal gas tragedy to 2G spectrum and coal scams to the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, its work was restricted to a few cases due to lack of resources and personnel.
“The number of cases handled by CBI is just equivalent or less than the cases handled by a single police station in the country,” the High Court said
The HC said the solution lay in granting CBI statutory status. The HC asked the Centre to consider and take a decision for enactment of a separate Act giving CBI statutory status with more powers and jurisdiction “at the earliest”.
Bringing the CBI under a special Act would ensure autonomy. “The CBI should have autonomy as that of Comptroller and Auditor General of India, who is only accountable to Parliament,” the HC had said.
Secondly, the HC said the CBI should have a dedicated cadre of officers on its own without getting the officials on deputation.
The HC said CBI should have a separate budgetary allocation. Further, the CBI Director should be given powers of a Secretary to the Government, who would directly report to the Minister/Prime Minister without going through the Department of Personnel and Training.
