With a single tweet, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday waded right in the middle of the controversy over the CBI accusing a top-ranking officer Rakesh Asthana of corruption.
For the first time in the history of the CBI, the agency booked its special director Rakesh Asthana last week on the complaint from a Hyderabad-based businessman Sana Satish Babu who claimed that he was asked for a ₹5 crore bribe on behalf of Asthana for his help in a case.
“An institution in terminal decline that’s at war with itself,” Gandhi, 48, tweeted after the CBI filed the case.
Asthana was brought to the CBI by the government in 2016 and had been widely perceived to have been positioned to head the CBI. As a Gujarat cadre police officer, Asthana had supervised the initial investigation into the Godhra train burning incident when he was inspector general of police of the state’s Vadodara range.
Asthana was also appointed as an interim CBI director in December 2016 provoking sharp protests from the opposition and had to eventually make way for Alok Verma, who was brought in as a full-time CBI boss five weeks later.
{{/usCountry}}Asthana was also appointed as an interim CBI director in December 2016 provoking sharp protests from the opposition and had to eventually make way for Alok Verma, who was brought in as a full-time CBI boss five weeks later.
{{/usCountry}}Gandhi called him PM Modi’s “blue-eyed boy”.
“The PM’s blue-eyed boy, Gujarat cadre officer, of Godhra SIT fame, infiltrated as No. 2 into the CBI, has now been caught taking bribes. Under this PM, the CBI is a weapon of political vendetta,” Gandhi tweeted.
The case against Asthana is seen to be a fallout of his feud with CBI director Alok Verma since October last year when Verma tried to stall his promotion as special director on the grounds that his name figured in a diary of the Gujarat-based company Sterling Biotech where some entries totalling ₹3.8 crore were allegedly found against his name.
Since then charges and counter-charges have been traded between the two officers over a series of probes and internal transfers.
Asthana formally made a complaint to cabinet secretary Pradeep Singh on August 24 saying Verma was interfering in probes carried out by him and gave the example of Sana Satish Babu.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also tweeted his attack on the CBI corruption case, accusing the government of having turned the CBI into a “national disgrace”. Kejriwal, the Aam Aadmi Party chief, who has been a bitter critic of the Congress when it was in power at the centre, said the BJP had clearly outdone the Congress.
“During the Congress rule the Supreme Court had termed the CBI a caged parrot, Modi govt has surpassed the Cong record and in its greed to victimise political opponents, Modi govt has turned the CBI into a national disgrace,” he said.