Two senior IPS officers considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi got removed from the race for the CBI chief’s post after Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana cited a Supreme Court guideline to rule out their candidature, government sources said on Tuesday.
CJI Ramana is said to have pointed out that according to the apex court’s guidelines in the 2006 Prakash Singh case, no officer with less than six months of service left should be appointed as a police chief.
This ruled out both Rakesh Asthana and Y.C. Modi. While National Investigation Agency (NIA) chief Y.C. Modi retires on May 31, Border Security Force (BSF) director-general Asthana’s tenure ends in August.
Justice Ramana is said to have referred to the guideline during a high-powered committee meeting on Monday
evening in which he, Prime Minister Modi and leader of the Opposition Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury discussed the appointment of the next CBI chief. The sources said Congress veteran Adhir supported this view.
On Tuesday night, the Centre appointed IPS officer Subodh Kumar Jaiswal as the new CBI chief. The 1985-batch officer from the Maharashtra cadre is currently the director-general of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).
“Controversial IPS officers Asthana and Y.C. Modi had been among the frontrunners for the post of the next CBI chief. But the CJI’s insistence on the apex court’s guideline in selecting the new chief ruled them out,” a government source said.
A CBI official said this was the first time the guideline had been cited while selecting a CBI director.
In the Prakash Singh judgement, the Supreme Court had looked into the problems related to the tenure and selection of police chiefs to avoid a situation where an officer who is to retire within a few months is given charge of a law-enforcement agency. The court had ruled that no officer with less than six months’ tenure remaining could be considered for the post of a police wing chief.
YC Modi Telegraph picture
Prakash Singh, who had served as the DGP of Uttar Pradesh and Assam, had moved the apex court after retirement, seeking police reforms and highlighting bad practices in the functioning of the police in India.
“During Monday’s meeting, CJI Ramana insisted that the guideline be complied with,” said a CBI official.
Selecting Jaiswal as the CBI director, an order issued by the Prime Minister-headed appointments committee of the cabinet said: “The appointments committee of the cabinet has, based on the panel recommended by the committee, approved the appointment of Subodh Kumar Jaiswal as director, CBI, for a period of two years from the date of assumption of charge of the office….”
The sources said the names of SSB director-general K.R. Chandra and special secretary (internal security) in the Union home ministry V.S.K. Kaumudi had also been considered. Jaiswal is the senior-most among the trio.
Y.C. Modi, a 1984-batch Assam-and-Meghalaya-cadre IPS officer, was part of the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) that probed the 2002 Gujarat riots when Narendra Modi was chief minister. The SIT had given the future Prime Minister a clean chit in the Gulbarg Society massacre in which 69 people had been killed.
Asthana, also a 1984-batch Gujarat-cadre IPS officer, had as inspector-general overseen the initial probe into the Godhra train burning that culminated in the riots.
Last year the CBI had given a clean chit to Asthana, a former CBI special director, in connection with a bribery scandal in 2018.
The case had triggered an unprecedented public feud between Asthana and then CBI director Alok Verma. Both had been benched by the Centre after an unusual midnight raid.
The CBI, the country’s premier investigative agency, was being headed by interim director Praveen Sinha, a Gujarat-cadre IPS officer, after regular director Rishi Kumar Shukla demitted office on February 2 on the expiry of his two-year tenure.
