How Supreme Court’s Tuesday judgement makes CBI director the most powerful bureaucrat

CENTRAL government officers holding the rank of joint secretaries and above can now be probed by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) without taking prior government permission, Supreme Court said on Tuesday in a landmark judgement that will in many ways make CBI director, an IPS officer, more powerful than cabinet secretary, the top Indian bureaucrat, a post reserved for IAS cadres. A five-judge constitutional bench ruled in favour of striking down…

BoI Power List 2013: CBI director Ranjit Sinha ranked 2nd most powerful bureaucrat

A Caged Parrot. Really?

WHEN 1974 batch Bihar cadre IPS officer Ranjit Sinha was appointed as CBI director in November last year, there was nothing much about him in public domain, except that he was friendly with RJD leader Lalu Prasad, and he had some issues with Prasad’s successor in the ministry: Mamata Banerjee. The Opposition BJP did not like Sinha’s appointment, and it continued to term CBI as Congress Bureau of Investigation. And the Supreme Court called it a “caged parrot” as late as May this year. But very soon, the government of the day realised that forcing Sinha to toe its line was tough. In fact, Sinha draws his power not so much from his chair but from the…