– Manas Dasgupta
MUMBAI, August 20: The first step in the CBI taking over the investigation of the deceased Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput as per the order of the Supreme Court on Wednesday is still to be taken with no information of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the CBI reaching Mumbai, the scene of the incident, till Thursday evening.
The CBI sources had earlier stated that the four-member SIT team constituted under the Gujarat cadre IPS officer Manoj Shashidharan, now with the CBI, was expected to reach Mumbai on Thursday to take over the charge of the investigation from the Mumbai police. The team was expected to be in Mumbai for at least seven days during which it was expected to be handed over the relevant documents and papers so far collected by the Mumbai police during the course of the investigation and also carry out questioning of some of the concerned persons including the medical staff who carried out the post mortem on the body of the deceased, some close friends and acquaintances of Sushant who are believed to be in the know of the things, and others.
The team would also take over the documents from the Bihar police before it could start the investigation. The CBI sources said the process could take some time before the actual probe could begin unless it gets entangled back in legal procedures.
The advocate for the Maharashtra government in the case before the apex court, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, had dropped enough hints to suggest that his client might go for review petition against the order of the single judge bench of Hrishikesh Roy who delivered the judgement on Wednesday rejecting the Maharashtra government’s plea that Mumbai police be allowed to continue with the investigation. The review plea was likely to be filed on the issue of the order awarding the investigation to the CBI was damaging the federal structure of the Indian constitution.
In case the Maharashtra government filed the review plea and managed to seek a stay on the single judge’s order or opt for other legal options, the CBI investigation in the case might be further delayed. Even otherwise, the political sources aver that the CBI’s past records in such complicated cases, particularly when it take over the investigation months after the incident, as it is in this case, was rarely covered with glory. In addition, the complaints of abetment to suicide, as filed by the father of the deceased Krishna Kishore Singh against Rhea Chakraborty, Sushant’s accused friend, on which the Bihar police had filed the FIR, were very rare to be proved and punished and many such cases including several involving the cine or television stars were either pending before the courts for long periods or had been rejected.
The Sushant case, meanwhile, was taking political shape with the BJP being accused of trying to give it a “twist” to take advantage in the coming elections to the Bihar Assembly and also use it as a stick to beat the “Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi” government headed by the Shiv Sena chief Udhav Thackrey. The BJP claimed that the Sushant “unnatural death” investigation had created a huge chasm between the MVA partners and both the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress “looked to be standing away” from the Shiv Sena on the issue with both the parties having offered “no objection” to the CBI investigation, with the NCP supremo Sharad Pawar’s grandson Parth Pawar, the son of the deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, actually raising the demand for CBI inquiry, while the Sena stood firm opposing the move.
“Thackrey must submit his resignation forthwith having failed to provide justice to the people of Maharashtra,” a BJP spokesman had demanded. But the NCP and the Congress sources had claimed that both the parties stood strongly with the Sena and there was “no question of any divisions within the ruling clique,” All the MVA partners have rejected the resignation demand and accused the BJP of trying to take political advantage of the Supreme Court’s order which had nothing to do with politics.
The Bihar police too had accused the Maharashtra, particularly the Mumbai police, of non-co-operation, while the Maharashtra police had rejected it. A senior Maharashtra police official said the allegation of the Bihar police that its senior officers who were sent to Mumbai for investigation were “deliberately quarantined” to ensure that they could not probe into the case was “uncalled for.” The officers were quarantined by the Mumbai municipal corporation, and not the police, under the current COVID protocol and not because they had come for Sushant case investigation on which the Mumbai police had raised the jurisdictional issue in the Supreme Court, the official said.
