Sleuths And Half-Truths

As its two top officers engage in battle, the CBI faces a damaging loss of credibility

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

In late 2016, a new chair was delivered to the CBI director’s room, on the top floor of the bureau’s 11-storey headquarters in Delhi. On December 2, the Narendra Modi government named Rakesh Asthana, a 1984-batch IPS officer of the Gujarat cadre, the interim CBI director. The chair, which Asthana supposedly bought, was large and comfy. Little did he know that he would not sit in it for long.

Barely a month later, on January 18, Asthana had to vacate his chair for Alok Verma, a 1979-batch officer from the Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territories cadre. A three-member committee—Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Justice J.S. Khehar and Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge— selected Verma for the post.

But perhaps the chair was cursed, in that it would not let a director complete his tenure. Because, nearly two years later, at around 2:30am on October 24, the government sent a notice to Verma’s house on Janpath, asking him to go on leave. Senior bureaucrats in the personnel department had burned the midnight oil to prepare the order. Minutes later, the cabinet appointments committee, headed by Modi, appointed the next most senior officer, M. Nageshwar Rao, as the CBI’s interim director. By afternoon, the government said that an “unprecedented and extraordinary situation had arisen, which demanded the government divest both Verma and Asthana (special director) of their roles, power and functions in the CBI till the CVC concludes its inquiry”.

The Central Vigilance Commission, which has supervisory powers over the CBI, will now look into allegations and counter-allegations between Verma and Asthana. Both had levelled charges of corruption, among others, against each other.