Just 12 days before his super-annuation, CBI Director Ranjit Sinha finds himself battered once again by the Supreme Court, which had once called the agency under him a “caged parrot”.
Controversy may be his middle name but his profile in the CBI website says he is one of the most experienced and outstanding IPS officers.
However, this is not the first time that Sinha has found himself on the wrong side of the judiciary as he faced the ire of Patna High Court in the 1990s for watering down the probe against the then Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad in the fodder scam case that was monitored by the judiciary. He was taken off the probe during trial.
The high court came down heavily on him in 1996 after U N Biswas, a CBI official then probing the scam, informed the court that the action taken report submitted before it was not the original report. He alleged that Sinha, then a deputy inspector general in CBI, had prepared a report omitting several observations damaging to Prasad.
The shocked judges learnt that Biswas’ report was substituted by the one prepared by Sinha. It was cleared by the senior administration in the agency. In a big blow to Sinha, the high court then termed his report “sketchy and truncated”. Later, the court later took the report prepared by Biswas into cognisance. Senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Modi had then filed a PIL requesting that Sinha be replaced. The CBI chief, a 1974 batch IPS officer, was taken off the case.
However, Prasad did not forget Sinha when he became railway minister during the UPA regime and brought him at the helm of the Railway Protection Force. But Sinha did not have a good relationship with Prasad’s successor Mamata Banerjee and was shifted to the ITBP.
As the investigations and trial in coal and 2G scam cases gathered pace, he once again found himself the target. He was accused of weakening the 2G case in favour of Reliance and others. Sinha was also blamed for the delay in filing the charge sheet against the Maran brothers in the Aircel-Maxis deal.
