Letter to BS: Drama involving WB govt and CBI is disturbing, unedifying

The drama involving the West Bengal government and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been both disturbing and unedifying. To the non-aligned, both parties’ behaviour fails the smell-test. The Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar should have joined the investigation much earlier. If he had apprehensions that he might be framed or coerced, then he could have sought the presence of his lawyer. The CBI team should have been treated with greater courtesy. Similarly, the CBI could have come at normal hours, not at 7 pm, and with less show of strength. The CBI’s inaction over the past four years, the fact that it’s not pursuing others allegedly involved, the timing of the visit, that is, on the last day of the interim chief of the agency, and doing all that just a few months before the elections — can be seen as part of a script.

This, however, brings up the bigger question of Union-state relations. By design, the Union government has been successful in extending its say over matters that can be better handled at the state level. The inter-state National Development Council is hardly functional. Another example is the duality over the cadre distribution of the Indian Administrative Services and the Indian Police Services officers. Once allotted to a state, these officers logically should be under the sole administrative authority of that state. The other is the post of the governor. He/she is the most senior unelected constitutional authority but there is little transparency in the appointment. The governor’s ability to seek dissolution of an elected state government on his own determination, should have had no place in a democratic Constitution.
 

Our states are not to the Union of India what a district of the state is to the state.                                                                                                     

P Datta New Delhi

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