CBI director gives Law Min Ashwani Kumar clean chit

Under fire from the Supreme Court over showing the CBI’s preliminary investigation report to the Law Minister and two other bureaucrats, CBI director Ranjit Sinha has claimed no “substantive changes” were made to it by the political executive. Sinha, who has been alternately praised and criticised for his affidavit in the apex court, has maintained that he was summoned by the Law Minister to see the report on 5 March. However,  in an interview to the Economic Times he has defended the showing of the report to the minister and other officials saying that the Supreme Court had never laid down any conditions saying the report could not be shown to the government “No substantive changes were allowed by me…we preserved the basic structure of the report and to the best of our ability we have protected the integrity of the investigation. The quality of our investigation is good and we have not removed any suspect or accused from this status report,” he said. [caption id=“attachment_748647” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The CBI director has blamed the former additional solicitor general. Image courtesy: PIB[/caption] However, the blame has squarely been laid on the former Additional Solicitor General Harin Rawal, who Sinha says didn’t consult the CBI before telling the apex court that the report hadn’t been shown to the government. The CBI director said that they had no intention of misleading the court and said that he couldn’t be blamed for Rawal’s statement, which was made despite the lawyer being present at the meeting between the CBI director and Law Minister. Rawal subsequently resigned over the issue, after claiming that Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati had called him for the meeting with the Law Minister and CBI director. But while Sinha may brush aside the charge of showing the report to the Law Minister as a minor one that was caused by an overzealous lawyer, Solicitor General Mohan Parasaran is quite clear that the investigating agency had erred.

“That is why the CBI director has stated in the affidavit that future reports wouldn’t be shared with the the political executive. This clearly shows that the agency knows what should be done and what not,” Parasaran told the Indian Express. 

The CBI has already given the Supreme Court in a sealed envelope the changes it had made to the first status report of its investigations into the coal block allocation scam, but is expected to state them again on 6 May when Sinha files his affidavit. And while the CBI chief may believe that he did not err in showing the investigation report to the government, particularly the departments it is supposed to be investigating, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will see it the same way.