KOLKATA: The Bengal government on Wednesday moved the Supreme Court challenging the Calcutta high court’s August 19 order asking the CBI to probe post-poll cases of murder, rape and attempted rape that were mentioned in a National High Rights Commission report.
The state, in its plea running into several hundred pages, said the CBI “is often invoked as a tool to persecute officials of the state government, public servants and representatives of the people in the state”. “An honest and impartial investigation cannot be expected from the CBI, especially in the context of the state of West Bengal,” the plea said.
The CBI has already lodged 31 cases and arrested two.
The HC left it to the investigating agency to define what would constitute “post-poll violence”, the state said, and cited a part of the order that said “post-poll violence” must “refer only to those incidents that took place in the immediate aftermath of the election results and the complaints must have a direct nexus to the election results”. The state argued this yardstick was not endorsed by a majority of the judges and that had led to several unrelated cases being called “post-poll violence”.
The HC, while ordering the CBI probe, had reasoned that the state had not responded to allegations of serious crimes of murder and rape; but the details of the incidents of rape were not shared with the state to enable it to respond, the state plea said.
‘2,877 reports on action taken filed by police’
The state had also provided an action-taken report on the allegations of murder mentioned in the NHRC report, it added. The state home secretary had filed a detailed response in court, running into more than 9,600 pages, and so there was no question of the state being in denial mode.
The Bengal government also argued against the HC remark on the “glaring discrepancies” in data between the NHRC and the state. The NHRC report was sketchy on details and attempted to pass off all offences as “post poll violence” whereas the state’s report was based on actual instances and action taken. Disputing the HC’s order that mentioned state inaction, the state argued it had received 3,384 complaints from all commissions and 2,877 action-taken reports were filed by police. Investigation into the other cases was continuing, it said.
The HC on August 19 ordered a “court-monitored” CBI probe into cases of murder, rape and attempted rape during the poll process in Bengal and set up a special investigation team under the supervision of a retired Supreme Court judge to probe other criminal cases. Both the CBI and the special probe team — comprising senior IPS officers Suman Bala Sahoo, Soumen Mitra and Ranveer Kumar — were told to submit their reports in six weeks.
