Two women in fray for CBI top post

As November 30 approaches, speculation abounds as to who will replace Anil Sinha as the new CBI director. As India’s pre-eminent corruption fighting agency, all eyes are on who will head the agency after the relative calm which has set in at CBI HQ in CGO Complex over the last two years during Sinha’s tenure. With its two previous directors caught in controversial maelstroms — A P Singh and Ranjit Sinha — the agency had lost a lot of its sheen and lustre.

Sadly , the CBI, which is always perceived to be a hand maiden of the government and during the UPA dispensation even came to be known derisively as the Congress Bureau of Investigation while being famously referred as the caged parrot by the Supreme Court which advocated its unfettering, has once again been in the news for all the wrong reasons.

The temblors due to the recent suicides by the Bansal family, perceived to be a fallout of the pressure being exerted by the agency, has brought the spotlight, and the negativity, back on the investigating agency.

The appointment of the new CBI director against this backdrop makes it even more intriguing. With two women in the fray, which, if they succeed, will make it a first for the agency, the game of thrones is afoot.

While special director Rupak Kumar Dutta is the seniormost CBI officer in line for succession, the Collegium may consider him for he is an insider who knows the system and the way the agency’s processes.

Other eligible candidates include Delhi Police commissioner and former DG (prisons) Alok Verma.

The panel is also likely to include Archana Ramasundaram, the first female IPS officer to head a para military organsation Sashtra Seema Bal as Director General. Ramasundaram, a 1980 batch officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, was earlier Special Director, National Crime Records Bureau. She was appointed to her current post till the date of her superannuation — September 30, 2017 — an order issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) said. The officer was in the news in 2014 over her appointment as Additional Director in the CBI. Then CBI director Ranjit Sinha was keen on her joining the CBI, but her appointment was challenged in the Supreme Court by the Tamil Nadu government, after which she was moved to the NCRB as its chief.

The other lady in contention is Maharashtra cadre IPS officer Meera C Borwankar currently Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development(BPR&D),a consultancy organisation under the Centre for modernisation of police forces. The Appointments Committee of Cabinet has appointed Borwankar, a 1981 batch IPS officer, as DG BPR&D till the date of her superannuation, i.E. September 30, next year, an order issued by Department of Personnel and Training had stated. In her long career, Borwankar has also worked in Maharashtra’s elite anti-terrorism squad (ATS).

Other contenders for the high profile job include recently appointed DG Maharashtra Satish Mathur. Known as perhaps the first National Security Guard (NSG)-trained 1981 batch IPS officer, Mathur has held several crucial postings in the past, including his tenure with the CBI, when he was one of the officers who prosecuted the 1993 blast accused. It was during this case that the CBI team, comprising Mathur, for the first time gave the prosecution’s say to the court including hyper-links, where one could click on the name of an accused and all the details regarding him would appear. Apart from CBI, Mathur was also the Director General, Legal and Technical, the first person to hold the post after it was created by the state to improve the conviction rate in Maharashtra. Mathur was also the Pune police commissioner and served a nearly five-year tenure with Air India on central deputation. The sixth name likely to be on the panel is Krishna Choudhary who heads the ITBP, a 50,000 strong force which secures the Chinese border. The 1979-batch Bihar cadre officer was earlier Director General of the Railway Protection Force under the Railway Ministry. Choudhary’s term ends in June 2017. Mathur’s advantage may be that he has worked in the CBI earlier.

Two years ago, in a first, PM Modi, the leader of the opposition and the Chief Justice of India had met to decided on Sinha’s name. A Collegium comprising the Prime Minister, Chief Justice of India HL Dattu and the leader of the largest opposition party Congress met to decide for the first time ever for bipartisan selection of the CBI director. Till 2014, this was always a political appointment.

This turned out to be the Collegium’s first such selection after the new anti-corruption Lokpal law was enacted. Ranjit Sinha was under a cloud, having been removed by the Supreme Court from the investigation of the 2G spectrum scam, one of the country’s biggest financial scandals, based on evidence that he tried to scuttle the probe, having met with several of the accused at his residence in Delhi. The Ranjit Sinha Diaries caused great tumult in political circles and much embarrassment to the agency itself.

The ruling BJP had then pointed out that it had objected to Sinha’s appointment but was overruled by the previous government of Manmohan Singh. Earlier, a committee headed by Central Vigilance Commissioner used to recommend names for CBI Director. The BJP was on record as saying that as leaders of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley had made it a point to object to Mr Sinha’s appointment hours before the report of a parliamentary committee recommending a Collegium for the CBI chief’s appointment was tabled in Parliament.