As is fairly well known, the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI] traces its origins to the Special Police Establishment [SPE]. This agency operated without statutory backing at first, but then was conferred legal basis first by way of an Ordinance [No. 22 of 1943] and then by the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act of 1946 [DSPE] — which remains on the statute book even today.
The primary task of the SPE was rooting out corruption from public service; or more specifically, central agencies and their officers. The need to combat corruption is perhaps one of those political and legal issues that resonates across time and space in independent India's history. Which is what makes the archive of the SPE a fascinating site to explore for anyone interested in how has the enforcement of laws fared in the past— either for pure, unsullied historical interest, or to draw lessons for the present.
This is the rabbit hole that I stumbled into after having found a copy of the Report published by the Bakshi Tek Chand Committee, or the "Report of the Special Police Establishment Enquiry Committee" (1952). It is a remarkable document in more ways than one. For instance, I did not know that permanent commission for the SPE itself was an uncertainty for many years. Nor did I know that staffing concerns undermined the agency as poorly back in 1952 as they did in the 1990s-2000s, when the Supreme Court decided it had to do something about the CBI's functioning.
The 1952 Report was merely the most visible part of the iceberg. Publicly available material pertaining to the SPE archive extends to providing us with a quotidian account of how the fledgling agency was being run at a time of unparalleled significance for the country. Just before independence we find letters being written to the Chief Commissioner, Delhi, for issuing Curfew Passes to SPE officers as they all lived in Old Delhi and could not manage to travel for work (!). It also has an interesting portrait of the officer in-charge of the agency in its initial years, one T.A. Bambawale.
The organisational setup shows how threadbare the operation was, a feature of the fiscal constraints as well as constraints imposed upon by partition on the availability of officers. We see detailed progress reports of cases being maintained and circulated, as well as acquittal reports with remarks by officers. There is protracted letter-writing on financial questions such as who should bear costs of hiring special counsel running a trial — a debate running from 1948 till 1953.
The archive shows us the other side of the story too: petitions to various authorities by persons aggrieved of their prosecutions. Writing to the agency the grounds invoked are in the language of law. And when that leads to no avail the aggrieved parties did not hesitate to write to the ministers themselves, invoking the idea of a "people's government" for good measure. All of this, mind you, was happening in the immediate aftermath of Independence Day on 15.08.1947 so as to curb further hearings scheduled for October — the wheels of justice continuing to turn and to give glimpses of the every day in an extraordinary moment.
For the lawyer, I particularly enjoyed glimpses from the archive about how legal procedures played out. A few of these vignettes pertained to one case — a prosecution against M/s JK Gas Plant and its directors for (essentially) illegal sale of iron during the War [part of the same group which is today responsible for other 'JK' businesses in India]. While I could not locate the fate of the trial which was proceeding before one of the Special Tribunals constituted through an Ordinance during the War [and retained pursuant to a logic of perpetual ordinances], the archive shows us that it was a somewhat sensational case where one of the accused [B.B. Mathur] sought police protection alleging threats to his life in August 1947 made by / on behalf of the other director of the company. His plea was found genuine and he was granted protection, up till July 1948 when it was withdrawn on his own request. Far more mundane was the affair surrounding summoning of a key prosecution witness for the trial. This witness was now in Pakistan, and a government employee. In a series of events all too familiar to criminal lawyers today, the government bungled up the manner in which summons had to be served on a witness residing abroad, delaying the trial. In a series of events all too familiar to witnesses, the case kept getting adjourned on multiple dates thereafter when the witness was present. Ultimately, the Pakistani authorities wrote to their Indian counterparts to complain about the sheer wastage of time this exercise had occasioned, and requested if a commission could come to Pakistan whenever the proceedings did decide to record evidence.
Unsurprisingly, some effort appears to have gone into thinking about publicising the work of this agency in which such faith was instilled. The publicity drive extended to more general efforts at informing the public about the existence of the SPE [a more low key version of governments doing automated calls to inform citizens about anti corruption bureaus]. In an odd twist, the generic piece so published ended up suggesting there was too much corruption, not the kind of messaging the government wanted. The solution became to share all draft articles with the government before publication. Careful measures were taken to publicise convictions, with press notes being circulated by the government through agencies like the AP etc and also being placed in newspapers of the day. Much of these pertaining to cases where officers were caught "red handed".
The catching of officers "red handed" is a technique that remains prominent to this day. Today these are called 'trap cases' where often the officer is entrapped into taking a bribe, with witnesses at hand to catch him in the act. Back in the day, a feature of the traps laid by the SPE appears to have been using judicial officers are eyewitnesses to the exchange of bribes. Such a 'committed' judiciary might have been the stuff of dreams for some in new India, but it was not palatable to more conventional heads such as the Justices of the Calcutta High Court [AIR 1951 Cal 524], who strongly deprecated the practice in 1951. A few years later [1954 SCR 1038], dealing with a set of appeals against convictions resulting from prosecutions launched by the SPE, the Supreme Court also dealt with a trap case. Here, not only had the SPE made an Additional District Magistrate a witness, but it had also supplied the bribe money for laying the trap [a princely sum of Rs.25,000/-]. While the Supreme Court accepted that laying of traps may be necessary on occasion, it strongly condemned the SPE having supplied the bribe money and having used members of the judiciary as witnesses for the trap.
The archive suggests that one of the reactions at the level of the SPE was to quickly reorient itself to make sure that it could use the technique of entrapment effectively. Accordingly, a memo was issued to all the ministries to depute officials who could serve as independent witnesses whenever the SPE asks, citing the need for independent witnesses to bolster the legitimacy of the entire exercise. It would be interesting to see what memos were generated in respect of the SPE using its coffers to set the trap itself!
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