In a significant intervention in violence-hit Manipur on the eve of a no-confidence motion debate in Lok Sabha where the Opposition is expected to corner the government over the situation in the state, the Supreme Court said Monday it is appointing former Mumbai Police Commissioner Dattatray Padsalgikar to be the “overall monitor” of a CBI probe into the instances of sexual violence in Manipur.
It also named a three-member committee of former High Court judges, headed by retired J&K High Court Chief Justice Gita Mittal, to look into the humanitarian aspects.
A three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud, said a detailed order is being issued in this regard, underlining that “our effort is to use whatever is within our power to restore a sense of confidence/faith in the rule of law” in Manipur “and to that extent bring a sense of trust and faith and confidence”.
The bench, also comprising Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, said, the “former police officer who will overall monitor the investigation would be Dattatray Padsalgikar… a highly decorated officer. He served in the NIA, served in the Intelligence Bureau, served in Nagaland in the 1990s”.
“What we are planning to do is this. We will constitute, at one level, a committee of three former High Court judges. This committee will be looking at things including relief, remedial measures, rehabilitation, compensation, restoration of homesteads, religious places of worship and so on and so forth. So the remit of the committee will be broad-based including looking at conditions of relief camps… They will look into diverse aspects of a humanitarian nature in the current situation,” it said.
Besides Justice Mittal, the committee will comprise former Bombay High Court judge Justice Shalini Phansaklar Joshi and former Delhi High Court judge Justice Asha Menon.
The bench, while seized of petitions seeking its intervention for restoration of order in Manipur, had taken suo motu cognisance of a video of two women being sexually assaulted and paraded naked in the state. The Centre subsequently told the bench that the state had handed over the investigation into the incident captured in the video to the CBI.
On Monday, the bench said “we are not going to supplant the CBI because we have an investigative agency which is looking after the investigation” but “at the same time, consistent with our mission to ensure that there is a sense of faith and overall sense of it being objective and dispassionate… we are proposing to direct that there shall be 5 officers at least of the rank of DySP or SP who will be brought into the CBI from various states”.
The bench said “we are conversant with the fact that a large part of the population in Manipur is conversant with Hindi. So what we will do is, we will ask the Director General of Police of these states where the officers would typically be conversant with the spoken Hindi language”.
It made it clear that “we are not casting any aspersion on CBI at all, otherwise we have transferred it from CBI” and said these officers “will be brought on deputation to the CBI specifically for the purpose of overseeing the investigation of these FIRs which have been transferred to” it.
“These officers will also be functioning within the four corners of the infrastructural and administrative set-up of the CBI. So they may be supervised by an officer of the Joint Director, CBI”, the bench said, adding it will ask the state DGPs to nominate the officers.
Besides this, the bench said “we are going to add one more layer of scrutiny for us”.
“A former IPS officer who has wide experience in investigation, he will oversee the nature of the investigation, we are not calling it SIT. But we need an additional oversight layer which will report back to us,” the bench said, naming Padsalgikar as the one it would be nominating.
It went through the status report submitted by the Manipur government and said, “We have seen from your statement… there will be 42 SIT looking after cases which have not been transferred to CBI”. It said inspectors from other states will also be brought on deputation to these SITs.
While the state said the SITs will be headed by an officer not below the rank of SP, the bench said “these SITs should be supervised by 6 DIG rank officers who will come from outside Manipur. Each officer will supervise about 6-7 FIRs and ensure that the investigation proceeds correctly”.
The CJI said he had interacted with all the three former judges and Padsalgikar and they had agreed to take up the assignment.
At the last hearing, the Supreme Court had asked the government to segregate the 6000 odd FIRs.
On Monday, the government shared the note on details of segregation with the court.
Attorney General R Venkataramani said “the government is handling the situation on a very mature level” and “today the position is still very tense. And a small trigger somewhere may push it in some other direction, it will be difficult to handle later”.
He said that regarding cases not given to the CBI, the suggestion is that in the case of murder etc, an SP-level officer monitors the probe, and in case of sexual offences, they will be probed by a team comprising only women officers. Besides, there will be SITs for other peripheral offences, he said. They will all work under the supervision of the DIG, the ADG or IG as the case may be.
There will be six SITs in each of the six districts, including Churachandpur, so that investigations can be expedited. For the other two districts, there will be two SITs each.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that besides the cases already decided to be transferred to the CBI, if any similar crime emerges during the course of the probe, it will also be handed over to the agency. He said that the team probing these has two SP-level women officers.
Firefighters try to douse a fire that was set in the houses of Kuki-Zo community by miscreants in the violence-hit Manipur, in imphal, Tuesday, Aug 1, 2023. (PTI Photo) 
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