A "caged parrot"
The BJP government led by Narendra Modi has now been in power for seven years. It has crippled India’s institutions, including the CBI. At the same time, public confidence in the CBI and other basic functions of governance has been eroded – members of the establishment enjoy almost complete impunity. As a result, we simply don’t trust our leaders anymore, and with good reason.
As a national institution, there are unusual limits on the CBI. Several states – including Kerala, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Rajasthan – have refused entry to its detectives, meaning that representatives are no longer able to investigate crimes within these states except by approaching the state government for permission to operate on a case-by-case basis.
State governments have made this decision for obvious reasons, because the CBI is far from neutral; instead, it has become an arm of the BJP government. None of the states that have refused entry to the CBI are Modi’s political allies. As a result, they have good reason to keep the CBI – by this point, little more than Modi’s personal police force – at arm’s length.
The BJP cannot take all the blame for the erosion of the CBI’s independence. A year before Narendra Modi came to power, in 2013, a Supreme Court judge denounced the agency as “a caged parrot speaking its master’s voice.” But there is no doubt that the BJP’s policy of centralisation and bringing national institutions under government control has compounded the problem and brought the CBI to its knees.