States Withdrawing Consent To CBI Is An Undesirable Position, Says Supreme Court

The Supreme Court (SC) has expressed concerns over eight states prohibiting the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from investigating cases.

The apex court has thus decided to examine the issue and even explicitly stated that ‘it is not a desirable position’.

CBI director SK Jaiswal filed an affidavit in the SC stating that eight states, namely: Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram have withdrawn their general consent, compelling the CBI to approach the states to obtain consent on a case-to-case basis.

Jaiswal revealed that these eight states provided their consent in less than 18 per cent of the cases out of the 150 requests made by the CBI from 2018 to June, 2021.

The CBI director further explained that the delay in trials is also caused by the stays granted by the respective state high courts (HC).

The legal department of the CBI is actually handling a massive 13,921 appeals pending in the sessions courts, HCs and the SC currently.

The SC bench has mentioned that both these matters need to be examined. Hence, it has issued notices to all the concerned states and HCs.

“Requests in approximately 78% of cases were pending, which mainly pertained to bank frauds of high magnitude impacting the economy of the country. The delay caused in taking up cases by the CBI due to any of the reasons mentioned above, at times, leads to destruction or dissipation of evidence,” Jaiswal said in the apex court, as reported by the Times of India (TOI).

He added, “This is detrimental not only for the investigation by the CBI but also for subsequent prosecution of cases.”