The Dubey case, so far

The Central Bureau of Investigation has just rounded up four men in connection with Satyendra Dubey’s murder. We welcome the importance the Bureau has accorded the case and its commitment to solve it. We would be prepared to go along with the scenario the country’s premier investigative agency has just sketched for us, provided it ties up the many loose ends that persist in the case.

What was the motive? As CBI Director U.S. Mishra told this newspaper, the motive for this crime is still to be established. If it was a robbery, where are Dubey’s personal effects that were stolen? Also, what were the reasons for the mysterious “suicides” of the two suspects that the Bureau had questioned early this year, Mukendra Paswan and Shivnath Sahu? Was it because these individuals knew too much that they were liquidated or were they so upset with the treatment accorded to them that they ended their own lives? Also, where is the only eye-witness to the incident, a rickshaw puller called Pradeep Kumar, who disappeared without a trace a few weeks after his statement was recorded by the police in December. Each of these aspects demands careful investigation and nobody knows this better than the CBI itself. That possibly explains Mishra’s extreme circumspection about the possible motives of the killers. Mishra has also, commendably, reiterated the Bureau’s commitment to file at least four cases linked to Dubey’s specific complaints about corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project that he had been overseeing.

Clearly, there is substance to Dubey’s conviction that there was something rotten in the manner this high-profile highway project was being executed in the Gaya stretch and he took it upon himself to inform the highest authorities in the land about it by writing to the Prime Minister’s Office in 2002, nearly a year before he was gunned down last November. We now owe it to the memory of this courageous man to thoroughly investigate not just his apprehensions about the project but his fear that his life was in danger because of the disclosures he had made — a fact that was callously made public. Dubey’s killing has highlighted an important lacuna in our criminal justice system — the abject vulnerability of the whistle-blower. It has led to a great deal of public debate about securing the safety of such an individual, which in turn has prompted the authorities to evolve a system of confidentiality and institutional protection toward this end. None of this can, or should, be forgotten. Neither must it be brushed under the carpet of administrative apathy.