30, Sep 2015

New Delhi, Sept. 29: The Narendra Modi government has appointed two officers in senior positions in the CBI, one of them a former member of a special investigation team that had given the country’s future Prime Minister a clean chit in a 2002 riot case.
Although a few months have passed since the appointments were cleared – one in April and the other in July – they have led to resentment within a section of the agency because of the alleged “proximity” of the officers to Modi.
Y.C. Modi, a 1984-batch Assam- and Meghalaya-cadre IPS officer who was part of the Supreme Court-appointed SIT that probed the 2002 Gujarat riots, was appointed as an additional director on July 1.
The SIT had given Modi, then Gujarat’s chief minister, a clean chit in the Gulbarg Society massacre in which 69 people were killed.
The other officer, Arun Kumar Sharma, a 1987-batch, Gujarat-cadre IPS officer, was appointed joint director – the No. 2 in the CBI hierarchy – on April 22. Sharma, according to a purported CD, was said to have been present at a meeting to “derail the investigation” into a fake encounter where Gujarat police have been accused of killing a college girl.
The officer’s name had also cropped up in a purported sting that claimed the state’s police had snooped on a woman architect at the behest of a Narendra Modi aide.
Both the appointments were cleared by the cabinet’s appointments committee that the Prime Minister heads.