On July 3, more than a year after Bollywood actor Jiah Khan was found hanging from the ceiling of her Mumbai flat, the Bombay high court took the case away from the city police and handed it over to the Central Bureau of Investigation.
The case was immediately controversial, with the police charging the young actor’s boyfriend, Suraj Pancholi, with abetting the suicide. Jiah Khan’s mother Rabiya suspects it was a case of murder.
While it is clear the truth of the matter remains in dispute, does the case really demand the involvement of the country’s foremost investigative agency?
The CBI has been registering and investigating an increasing number of cases from across the country on request by state governments or on the orders of high courts or the Supreme Court. It has a reputation for being able to crack cases better than the regular police, but does that mean the CBI should be investigating cases that might otherwise fall under the ambit of the police?
In 2011, CBI registered 1,003 new cases. In 2013, the number had risen to 1,131, with 861 cases still under investigation from the previous year. By the end of 2013, the bureau had disposed of 1,070 cases in all:
This is a heavy workload for a specialist force of high-ranking investigating officials. It is also worth noting that CBI investigations have a high conviction rate. In 2013, the conviction rate in the cases handled by the bureau was 68.6%. In contrast, in 2012, the conviction rate in criminal cases handled by the police was just 38.5%.
“People’s faith in the police has been reducing every year, and the CBI’s role has expanded significantly in the past few years,” said GP Joshi, retired director of the central government’s Bureau of Police Research and Development.
The CBI was first set up in 1941 as the Special Police Establishment, and then renamed the Central Bureau of Investigation in 1963. Its initial mandate was to investigate graft, corruption, financial scams and serious economic fraud, but its role gradually expanded. Today, it has an anti-corruption division, an economic offences division as well as a special crimes division for the investigation of “serious, sensational and organised crime under the Indian Penal Code”.
“Because the CBI has developed expertise in solving all kinds of normal crimes along with economic crimes,” said US Misra, a former CBI director, “the high courts have also been assigning quite a few cases to it, even though the Supreme Court had said that cases should be passed to the CBI sparingly.”
But is it only the CBI’s record for high conviction rates that makes it the investigative agency of choice? Joshi believes the conviction rate is not a factor at all. He says the main reason why the CBI records more convictions is because it deals with a large number of corruption cases that involve examining available documents. Most other forms of criminality, murders or robberies, say, have fewer kinds of tangible evidence that are as easily accessed.
“Ideally, the local police is best suited to investigate such crimes, but the main advantage of the CBI is that it is an external agency,” said Justice R Sodhi, a retired Delhi high court judge. “It is thus considered less susceptible to pressures from local elements.”
This is evident from the Jiah Khan case, in which the actor’s mother has alleged that the local police carried out a poor investigation, ignoring certain injury marks on her daughter’s body that indicated homicide. She also claimed that the family of Khan’s boyfriend was using political clout to influence the probe.
In response, the high court passed the case on to the CBI, asking it to conduct an “independent and impartial” probe.
While experts do not vouch for the complete impartiality of the CBI at the central level, they believe the bureau does have some undeniable assets.
“Unlike the police, CBI officials have no other duties beyond investigation, which is conducted under tight supervision by high-ranking officials,” said Joshi. “It also has better resources to fall back on.”
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The case was immediately controversial, with the police charging the young actor’s boyfriend, Suraj Pancholi, with abetting the suicide. Jiah Khan’s mother Rabiya suspects it was a case of murder.
While it is clear the truth of the matter remains in dispute, does the case really demand the involvement of the country’s foremost investigative agency?
The CBI has been registering and investigating an increasing number of cases from across the country on request by state governments or on the orders of high courts or the Supreme Court. It has a reputation for being able to crack cases better than the regular police, but does that mean the CBI should be investigating cases that might otherwise fall under the ambit of the police?
In 2011, CBI registered 1,003 new cases. In 2013, the number had risen to 1,131, with 861 cases still under investigation from the previous year. By the end of 2013, the bureau had disposed of 1,070 cases in all:
This is a heavy workload for a specialist force of high-ranking investigating officials. It is also worth noting that CBI investigations have a high conviction rate. In 2013, the conviction rate in the cases handled by the bureau was 68.6%. In contrast, in 2012, the conviction rate in criminal cases handled by the police was just 38.5%.
“People’s faith in the police has been reducing every year, and the CBI’s role has expanded significantly in the past few years,” said GP Joshi, retired director of the central government’s Bureau of Police Research and Development.
The CBI was first set up in 1941 as the Special Police Establishment, and then renamed the Central Bureau of Investigation in 1963. Its initial mandate was to investigate graft, corruption, financial scams and serious economic fraud, but its role gradually expanded. Today, it has an anti-corruption division, an economic offences division as well as a special crimes division for the investigation of “serious, sensational and organised crime under the Indian Penal Code”.
“Because the CBI has developed expertise in solving all kinds of normal crimes along with economic crimes,” said US Misra, a former CBI director, “the high courts have also been assigning quite a few cases to it, even though the Supreme Court had said that cases should be passed to the CBI sparingly.”
But is it only the CBI’s record for high conviction rates that makes it the investigative agency of choice? Joshi believes the conviction rate is not a factor at all. He says the main reason why the CBI records more convictions is because it deals with a large number of corruption cases that involve examining available documents. Most other forms of criminality, murders or robberies, say, have fewer kinds of tangible evidence that are as easily accessed.
“Ideally, the local police is best suited to investigate such crimes, but the main advantage of the CBI is that it is an external agency,” said Justice R Sodhi, a retired Delhi high court judge. “It is thus considered less susceptible to pressures from local elements.”
This is evident from the Jiah Khan case, in which the actor’s mother has alleged that the local police carried out a poor investigation, ignoring certain injury marks on her daughter’s body that indicated homicide. She also claimed that the family of Khan’s boyfriend was using political clout to influence the probe.
In response, the high court passed the case on to the CBI, asking it to conduct an “independent and impartial” probe.
While experts do not vouch for the complete impartiality of the CBI at the central level, they believe the bureau does have some undeniable assets.
“Unlike the police, CBI officials have no other duties beyond investigation, which is conducted under tight supervision by high-ranking officials,” said Joshi. “It also has better resources to fall back on.”