Though the UPA government has questioned the Supreme Court’s order setting up of a Special Investigating Team to probe the black money issue, its challenge seemed to be contrary to its earlier stand strongly supporting the formation of SITs for probing the Gujarat riot and Sohrabuddin encounter cases.
Constitution of the SITs on the orders of the court for probing the high-profile cases was also not new, as it had happened in several complex crimes with political overtones like the Rajiv Gandhi assassination and the JMM MPs bribery case.
When the Supreme Court heard long arguments on the PILs by the National Human Rights Commission and the NGO Citizen for Justice and Peace demanding constitution of an SIT to investigate the Gujarat riots, different law officers of the Centre, including the late Attorney-General Milon Banerjee and former Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam, had strongly supported their petitions.
Similar supportive stand was taken by Mr Subramaniam — who incidentally had resigned recently in the backdrop of “adverse” orders in the black money and the 2G scam cases argued by him — for an SIT probe into the Sohrabuddin fake encounter in Gujarat.
However, the investigation in the Sohrabuddin case was later transferred to the CBI by the top court after questions were even raised on SIT by the relatives of Sohrabuddin and even by the Union government law officers.
The SIT for Gujarat riots was constituted by the top court under retired CBI director R.K. Raghavan, who has since been supervising the investigation by serving police officers, while in the SIT for probing the black money would be under two former Supreme Court judges, who would oversee the investigation of a multi-disciplinary probe body of 11 top-ranking officers of different probe agencies and the government’s financial wings.
Thus in both the cases, the SIT would be headed by non-serving government entities, which would control the functioning of the serving officers.
Though in the Gujarat riot case, the Union government supported appointment of Mr Raghavan, a retired CBI director, as the head of the SIT who has been directly reporting to the top court, in the black money issue, the Centre had opposed the top court’s move to place two retired judges over the serving officers to investigate the case, which would also be monitored by the court.
Senior advocate Anil Diwan, who had argued the black money case, had cited past precedents for handing over the probe to the SITs in special situations.