Death of a family man

B K Bansal is dead. With him, his 25-year-old son also gave himself to the rope. The twin-suicides that rocked the capital last week came on the back of the similar suicides of the corporate affairs ministry official's wife and daughter. Bansal was accused of taking bribes from executives of Elder Pharmaceuticals to prevent a possible reference to the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) of allegations of irregularities in the company. Bansal was reportedly caught red-handed by the sleuths of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The action was demonstrative of the Narendra Modi government's efforts to root out corruption at all levels. There can be no two opinions about the need to eradicate this social evil.

However, the methods followed have come under criticism following the detailed suicide notes mailed to media organisations by the Bansals. Some commentators have said that CBI is an 'uncaged vulture' and not a caged parrot, as described by the Supreme Court once. Political rivals such as Arvind Kejriwal have opportunistically latched on to a reference to Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah in the note.

A more useful line of probe would be to find out which are the serious fraud cases that Bansal referred to the SFIO and those he did not during his tenure in this position. Preferably, this should be a time-bound judicial probe as the CBI cannot be the judge of its own case and the credibility of a local police would always be under cloud.

The broader issue here is the institutional capacity of our investigative agencies, their ability to deal with documentary evidence, file charge sheets and bring the accused to trial. These short-staffed entities (the Supreme Court had to instruct the Centre to appoint a full-time head for the Enforcement Directorate) in a hurry to close cases, often resort to strong-arm tactics. People closely watching some high-profile cases say middle-level officers in some central agencies are not even able to comprehend the provisions of the law, whose violations they are probing. Often, prosecution efforts are lost in translation from the language of interrogation to English, the language of trial.

On the other hand, officers who have been targets of such CBI probes, refer to several instances where cases have lingered on several years before being dismissed. The events remind one of India's Oscar entry, the real events inspired Tamil hit Visaranai, in which a suave auditor, who knows a bit too much, held extra-judicially by the cops, succumbs to custodial injuries, which then triggers a series of staged encounters.

Let us for a moment assume that an innocent bureaucrat is framed by a vested interest. What defence does he have? Unlike a white-collar criminal in the corporate sector, who has legal assistance at his beck and call, a bureaucrat is often a lonely man. The only people he can rely on when the might of the state swoops down on him are his immediate family members. Is it fair to choke this very support system, especially when there is no direct involvement? What right do the investigative agencies have to misbehave and bully the wife and the daughter of the accused? In an ideal situation, the agency should be assisting them to get legal help, if they are confident of evidences they have gathered. Courts have advised the agencies to avoid arrests as these cases stand on documents. We are not some medieval society. We need to show the world while we have the resolve to fight corruption, we also have enough civility to treat even the wrongdoers with dignity. We certainly can do better than threatening an elderly man, howsoever corrupt he might be, of turning his loved ones into 'living corpses'.