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Patna,(BiharTimes): Though leaders of opposition in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, have opposed the appointment of Ranjit Sinha as the new CBI Director on the plea that the Rajya Sabha panel has recommended that the government be stripped of this power there are other reasons too behind the opposition. The Rajya Sabha panel had said the decision be left to a panel comprising the PM, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha and the chief justice of India.
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 But there is a Bihar connection too for this opposition. It needs to be recalled that during the fodder scam probe days of 1990s Ranjit Sinha, who was then DIG (CBI) was accused by none else but the CBI Joint Director (East), U N Biswas, of interfering with the investigation to protect politicians and bureaucrats.
Biswas created a flutter in the room of division bench of Patna High Court comprising Justices S N Jha and S J Mukhopadhyaya, when he told them that the report submitted before the court was not the original one but the one submitted by his deputy, Ranjit Sinha (DIG).
The bench passed the strictures on CBI officials following revelations by U N Biswas that the CBI headquarters was interfering with the investigation to protect politicians and bureaucrats.
Biswas also informed the court the headquarters ignored the report sent by him and instead cleared Sinha’s report.
After Biswas’ submission, the bench termed the report submitted by Ranjit Sinha as ‘truncated and sketchy’ and demanded to know why there were ‘startling’ difference between the reports submitted by him earlier and the one presented by Sinha.
The court expressed its disapproval of CBI’s failure to expose the politician-bureaucrat nexus in the scam.
The counsel for the leader of the opposition, Sushil Kumar Modi, pleaded before the court that Biswas was being harassed by the higher authorities. The counsel asked the court to provide ‘strictest’ security to Biswas.
Ranjit Sinha, who was then accused of being soft towards Lalu Yadav, was made DG of Railway Protection Force in Nov 2008, when the latter was the Railway Minister of the country. But Mamata Banerjee got him shifted. He was then made DG, ITBP.
Hindustan Times had reported on Friday Sinha’s appointment appeared to have been hurriedly done to stonewall intervention by the Central Administrative Tribunal that will hear Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar’s petition on Friday.
Kumar had last week dragged the government to the tribunal, complaining he’d been unfairly overlooked for the post on the grounds that a government official he had arrested for bribery had accused him of criminal intimidation and illegal confinement. Kumar on Friday withdrew his petition.
The Central Bureau of Investigation is the nation's premier criminal investigating agency and its chief reports to the Prime Minister.
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