Poodles and Power

The other day, Rajdeep Sardesai and Yogendra Yadav were animatedly facing off on CID Karnataka’s 18 letters to the Election Commission. Not one had responded. Result: standstill investigation on the vote “chori” in Mahadevpura! Is CID really helpless? Let us examine it under the 1973 Criminal Procedure Code, now renamed. An example from my past will be helpful, not out of place.

In March 1993, ISI Pakistan, the Government of Pakistan, taking advantage of the Babri Masjid demolition (permitted and connived at by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao), organised with deftly arranged coordination between Indian and Pakistani smugglers and some members of the corrupt airport staff in Dubai, the serial bomb blasts in then Bombay. The Commissioner of Police, Bombay, and the Special Task Force CBI (STF) (which I, as Joint Director, CBI and Special Inspector General, Special Police Establishment, headed) investigated and prosecuted the accused.

Out of nearly 185 Indians and Pakistanis named in the charge sheet, over 100 were arrested. The absconders continue to be arrested and prosecuted till recently. Dawood’s goons, even those not named as accused in the serial bomb blasts, were on the run. We and the State Police forces were hunting them.

A few years after 1993, about half a dozen of Dawood’s goons were caught by the Delhi Police. The Government of India ordered that the CBI would investigate the ramifications of their hiding in Delhi.

The CBI head was then a deputationist Indian Police Service officer, Vijay Rama Rao. Veer Sanghvi, during his tenure as Director CBI, described him as PM Narasimha Rao’s “poodle.” I, a CBI insider, had also come to the same conclusion very early on during his tenure as Director of CBI.

Let me explain in some detail. The CBI hierarchy then was something like this: at the top, CBI was manned by deputationist IPS officers and CBI UPSC-recruited insiders. The latter, in my time, were few and far between. Now they are non-existent. Among the IPS, during Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s tenures, they reached top positions only by going through the ranks in the CBI. The parachuting to the top was first done by Chandra Shekhar and then by Narasimha Rao. Now it continues with all insiders, i.e., UPSC-recruited, eliminated.

Vijay Rama Rao’s predecessor, S. K. Dutta, was also a deputationist Indian Police Service officer but a thoroughbred CBI officer, who had risen to the top through all ranks. He had placed me on top of the Anti-Corruption Wing of CBI/Special Police Establishment. He had also assigned me the task of exposing all politicians and bureaucrats who were named in abbreviated form in the Jain Hawala Diary. His predecessor, Vijay Karan, a deputationist Indian Police Service officer who had parachuted to the top, had hijacked this crime. Vijay Rama Rao, a similar parachutist, was now tasked to do the same.

So, in due course, he, in a show of concern for the heavy load that I carried as Joint Director (Anti-Corruption) and Joint Director (STF), relieved me of the Anti-Corruption charge. Thus, my efforts to book the beneficiaries of the Jain Hawala Diary came to nought. But to his horror, my STF charge was also trouble for him. His master’s Cabinet member, Kalpnath Rai, came up as the big fish among those who were sheltering Dawood’s goons caught in Delhi.

We had enough material to question his role. Like the EC in Mahadevpura, he stonewalled the investigation. We could arrest him. Discretion being the better part of valour, that was postponed. Vijay Rama Rao was no help. What then?

I ordered a charge sheet against all the accused we had found and arrested so far. Among them were several who had acted on Kalpnath Rai’s orders. I ordered them to be charge-sheeted along with the goons already arrested. The charge sheet should spell out, I ordered, the evidence collected against Kalpnath Rai. But it should be added that he has not been named as an accused, as the investigation against him is yet to be completed. He has defied the CBI summons. Carefully, excerpts from the Investigating Officer’s Diary—all efforts, so far fruitless, made to question him—were reproduced in the charge sheet.

Deliberately, I was informing the trial court that we had not used all our legal powers, such as arrest, search, and that this suspect had defied our summons. I wanted a second mind to examine our work and question our non-use of our legal powers. With Vijay Rama Rao giving us no help and arresting a Cabinet Minister raising a stink, I sought the trial court’s insight. I wanted the trial to help.

The trial court pulled up CBI and ordered Kalpnath Rai’s arrest, custodial interrogation, etc. Vijay Rama Rao caved in to the court. I got my interrogation. We charge-sheeted him. The trial court sentenced him to ten years’ penal servitude.

I suffered. Vijay Rama Rao became very charming and benign to me. Sure sign of trouble. He and his Joint Director, who was the custodian of our service records, P. C. Sharma, hunted my past. They found in my past as DIG a charge of alleged misuse of my official position, which, as S. K. Dutta (then retired) informed me much later, when the matter came up in a casual conversation between us, had been enquired into and closed. Thereafter, I was promoted and decorated with the President’s Distinguished Service Medal, too.

He got it reopened and issued a “warning,” also ensuring it would not become a part of my service record. I could not, therefore, seek a remedy. Later, when my application to Interpol Lyons, on their advertisement, was selected, subject to the Government of India also forwarding my name, he showed his vengeful nature. He promised me, in a charming manner, that he would ensure it, but got it scotched.

When, after my retirement, the National Fertiliser Corporation (NFL) sought my services to enquire into the Rs 133 crore Urea Scam, he actually wrote to the MD, NFL, to dispense with my services on the ground that now, as CBI is investigating the Urea Scam, NFL did not need the services of a retired CBI officer. I voluntarily quit rather than face the ignominy of being fired. The MD, NFL, warned me in time.

My conviction is that he did so, as my presence in the NFL presented a possibility of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s son, Prabhakar Rao, being an accused in the Urea Scam too. Already, his friends and relations were charge-sheeted. Vijay Rama Rao was honour-bound to protect him. How he did so in the CBI investigation, by transferring a CBI insider, is another instance of his poodle-like behaviour. CID Karnataka should treat the Election Commission as a suspect. By not replying, it is conspiring with the suspects named in the FIR.

Views expressed are personal. The writer served in the CBI from 1963 to 1996