Do we need the CBI to know if Mulayam has assets disproportionate to his income???

The myth about the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) being an autonomous agency has exploded once again. The about turn by the agency in the case involving Mulayam Singh Yadav is the latest of these instances.

The case against Mr. Yadav is that he owns assets disproportionate to his known source of income. That is what the CBI said until sometime ago. The provocation for the agency to deny its own case now is clear to anyone. And it was reported in the media, on the day before the case came up for hearing in the Supreme Court, that the investigating agency was going to deny its own case. In other words, the secret was out there in the open even before the apex court was told that there-is-no-case-now.

And if there is someone there, reading this column, who does not know the reason behind the change in the CBI’s position, it is like this. Mulayam Singh Yadav, after having saved the Manmohan Singh Government from falling and ensuring that the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal did not collapse, has turned into a national hero. And it is important that the nation accord him the status of a national hero. There is, after all, the contextual setting in which a criminal act is to be seen.

Recall what Prakash Karat said in a recent TV interview: That the charge against someone being a criminal will have to be seen in a context and that he went on to explain that by stating that he too had broken the law on several occasions and charged under sections of the criminal law. Well. If someone’s character is to be decided upon whether he or she had been to jail, we will have to include a number of our beloved leaders among the list of bad people.

The point is that it is important to see the charges against a public person from the context in which it is made. And the CBI, as an institution, cannot see crime from out of the context and go about prosecuting someone just because the agency found evidence against that person. In other words, being an agency of the Government and meant to protect the national interest, the CBI just had to do what is in national interest at any given point of time.

This, indeed, is how the CBI’s turn around can be explained. When the Samajwadi Party was part of the opposition and the Manmohan Singh Government was comfortable having a majority in the Lok Sabha, it was the CBI’s duty to persecute Mulayam Singh Yadav and investigate into his income and assets. He was, after all, acting against the ``national interest’’ then! He was critical of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi then. And on top of all that, he had Amar Singh with him whose statements about the Congress icons bordered on abuses. The CBI then had to reign in such persons as part of its duty!

All that changed after July 22, 2008. Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh turned into holy men. And with Kalyan Singh too in the fold, the Samajwadi Party is now a bunch of saints and the CBI, naturally, had to change its stand. We did see that happen in the Bofors case earlier. The CBI, after having got all the necessary documents to nail in the recipients of the kickback from the Bofors deal (by way of the papers from the Swiss Banks) when Deve Gowda was Prime Minister did a shoddy job in the courts to ensure that the accused got away.

That the CBI had to do that because the list of accused in that case included one Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian national and a close friend of Sonia Gandhi is known to all. But there are some people who pretend to be unaware of such simple facts. And this is the same case in the Mulayam Singh Yadav case too. And this is most likely to happen in the Pinarayi Vijayan-SNC Lavalin scandal too. The point is that the CBI is not an autonomous agency. It is meant to catch the thief only when the ruling party wants that!

All this does not mean that there is no case against Mulayam Singh. Anyone in Uttar Pradesh and in Delhi knows about Mulayam Singh and his financial status when he entered public life sometimes in the early Sixties. Everyone knows that he was not a wealthy person when he became MLA in 1967 and minister in 1977. And even a child in Uttar Pradesh, who knows to count money, will know his worth now. He is worth several thousand crores; and his brothers who have not done any productive work for several years too are worth several thousand crores.

In other words, we do not need the CBI to establish that Mulayam Singh Yadav’s assets are disproportionate to his known source of income. But then, why single out Mulayam Singh Yadav alone for this. I think it will be a better idea to employ the CBI to investigate and tell us about political leaders whose assets are proportionate to their income!

I used to know a few persons of that kind. Some of them are dead now. V.P.Singh, Madhu Dandavate, Nripen Chakroborty, Kamaraj and Kakkan. I may have missed out a lot of names. Let us put the CBI to bring out that list because it calls for some experts to work.