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Journalism of Courage
All that it took this newspaper to meet Vi-render Prasad, the 8220;missing witness8221; in the sensational Priyadarshini Mattoo case was a visit to the man8217;s native village in Bihar8217;s Siwan district. The Central Bureau of Investigation, the premier investigating agency of the country, could not locate him all these months and his crucial evidence could not, therefore, be presented to the court.
The CBI8217;s failure, coupled with its other criminal lapses, led to the acquittal of the accused, Santosh Singh, although the judge was personally convinced about his guilt. It was, perhaps, for the first time that a judge had been constrained to acquit an accused even when it defied his own personal sense of justice. The judgment picked holes in the CBI investigations, which when juxtaposed with The Indian Express8217;s follow-up reports, seemed to indicate that the intention of the investigators was to let the guilty off the hook, rather than bring him to book. Needless to say, all this has brought the CBI under a cloud. Whatis at stake is its credibility, which is the summum bonumr of any investigative agency worth its salt. Thus the challenge facing the CBI today is to retrieve its lost honour and reestablish itself as an impartial body that will not wilt under pressure, from within or without. Central to this task is an inquiry into the conduct of those who had brought the CBI to such a pass.
From the available evidence and court rulings, it is not difficult to fix responsibility for the CBI8217;s la-pses. Obviously, all this was done with a view to helping the ward of a fellow officer and to allow the investigators to go scot free would be a travesty of justice. It is unfortunate that at a time when the conviction rate in criminal cases is abysmally low, the investigators are neither rewarded nor punished for their successes or failures, as the case may be. Con-sequently, there is no personal stake for the investigators in such cases. This needs to be corrected so that those who investigate criminal cases put their total commitment into their work.
But for the present, an early reopening of the case is a must to restore people8217;s faith in the criminal justice system in the country. Thiscannot be overemphasised, more so when the CBI will soon be pursuing such important cases as the one on the purchase of the Bofors gun.
