Sushant Singh Rajput Case: Does CBI’s record inspire confidence?

IN PERSPECTIVE

Does the CBI possess a silver bullet to solve the Sushant Singh Rajput case? Will the large battery of CBI officials who have arrived in Mumbai be able to resolve whether the Bollywood ended his own life or was murdered?

Going by the way the CBI has botched up several high-profile cases, the optimism expressed by both Rajput’s family and by his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty may be far-fetched.

The CBI’s handling of the death of actor Jiah Khan, a case that bears similarity to that of Rajput, does them no credit. Jiah was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her Juhu apartment on June 3, 2013. More than seven years have passed, and the case is still nowhere near resolution.

One year after her death, the Bombay High Court ordered the case to be handed over to the CBI for further investigation. The CBI took over a year to conclude its probe but failed to file a charge sheet declaring its findings. This, when Jiah had left behind a suicide note which alluded to some tension between her and her boyfriend Suraj Pancholi.

It was only after the Special Women’s Court Judge AS Shende pulled up the CBI for unnecessary delay that on December 9, 2015, the CBI finally filed a charge sheet which termed Jiah's death as suicide and accused Suraj Pancholi of abetment.

Interestingly, the Special Women's Court pulled up both the CBI and Juhu Police for shoddy work on the case as they failed to submit the dupatta by which Jiah had been found hanging or even the tracksuit she was wearing on that fateful day.

The CBI claims it did not receive these items, but the Forensic Science Laboratory pointed out that these items had been placed in a sealed envelope and submitted to the court.

Speaking recently to the media, Suraj Pancholi said that when this incident occurred, he was 21 years old. Today, he is 28, and the case still nowhere near a conclusion.

Another high-profile case that the CBI bungled was the Aarushi murder case, over which two teams from the CBI gave diametrically opposite findings.

The first CBI team, led by CBI Joint Director Arun Kumar, debunked the investigation done by the Noida police and concluded that Aarushi had been murdered not by her parents, the dentist couple Dr Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, but by Dr Talwar’s compounder Krishna and two domestic servants, Rajkumar and Vijay, who were witness to her murder as also that of their in-house help Rajesh.

Arun Kumar’s report was debunked by the then CBI director and a new officer was brought in. Strangely, from then onwards, the CBI had only two suspects – Rajesh and Nupur Talwar. This resulted in their imprisonment, till they were finally acquitted by the Allahabad High Court on grounds of lack of evidence.

Nor did CBI cover itself in glory in the way it handled the double murder and rape of the Badaun sisters found hanging from a mango tree on May 27, 2014. Despite the post-mortem report showing that the girls had been raped and had died by strangulation, the CBI, when brought into the investigation, concluded that these teenage girls had ended their own lives.

The CBI closure report was overturned subsequently by a POSCO court much to the discomfiture of the “country’s premier investigative agency”.

More recently, a 12-member CBI team was brought in to investigate the Unnao rape case, which saw the powerful BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar being put behind bars. But even in this case, in which the rape victim’s father died in police custody and a key witness in mysterious circumstances, the CBI’s statement insinuating that the car in which the rape victim, two aunts and her lawyer were travelling to court in Rae Bareli “was going at great speed” is strange to say the least.

The driver of the truck that bumped into the car was driving on the wrong side of the road and the accident resulted in the death of the rape survivor’s two aunts while she herself and her lawyer suffered serious injuries. And yet, the CBI chose to underplay it.

The CBI has been described as a “caged parrot”. Others have described it as “His Master’s Voice”, known to act blatantly at the behest of the government of the day. It is no secret that it is being actively used against Opposition leaders. Each time either Mayawati or Akhilesh Yadav open their mouths to criticise the government, they are reminded of the disproportionate assets cases against them being investigated by the CBI.

Closer home, Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa was let off by the court though he had been charge-sheeted by the CBI for accepting donations made to his trust by miners in return for hefty contracts. The moot point is, why did the CBI not appeal against the order?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chilling warning to the Congress and other Opposition parties “Jabaan sambhal kar rakho, warna mere paas aap ki poori janam patri padi hui hai (Keep your mouths shut, else I have all the details about you)” seems to have been taken seriously by our Opposition leaders who seldom take the government to task on crucial issues.

In Mumbai, the CBI team has been handed over the case diaries of the Sushant Singh Rajput case and they have already started questioning his domestic staff. They have also filed a FIR against Rhea Chakraborty on grounds of abetment of suicide and misappropriation of funds. Let us see if the CBI can do justice to this case which has now become highly politicised.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)