Unflinching Moral Compass

The grapevine says, uniformly, the CBI Superintendents reported that people hated the Emergency days

- SHANTONU SEN

Emergency occurred in India in June 1975. Fifty years down the Ganga, I recall my own two brushes with it. One, which nearly cost me my position. Let me recount it first.

This one was in 1976, and I had just moved to the no. 1 position among CBI SPs in Kolkata.

The morning mail had brought orders. A Deputy Collector, Central Excise in then Calcutta, was "persuading" Golden Tobacco Co., then under Sanjay Dalmia with a retired Intelligence Bureau chief as its Executive Head, to feather his nest. In the Anti-Corruption Wing of CBI Kolkata, as its Superintendent 1, I was ordered to book him.

The orders came with a caveat: no coercive measures were to be applied against Golden Tobacco Company. The bribe payer was not to be put under any coercive investigation! It was a bizarre order, but then, it was Emergency 1975. No search, no interrogation, no arrest. All specifically forbidden.

I was a CBI insider, UPSC recruited, not a deputationist from the Indian Police Service. Law, and not my superior, was my master in matters of investigation. The superior was only my master in matters of administration. So I decided to disregard the order, but not disobey it. My job was to prove that the unearthing of the crime in its entirety was believable—i.e., extracting the evidence: if the hush money was paid, who paid; what were his means; was he muscled, or was he a partner in crime with the Golden Tobacco Company? If it was the latter, were they complicit? I needed evidence to decide one way or the other.