New Delhi: “Pre-meditated and choreographed exercise” where facts were arranged to support a predetermined conclusion—that is what a special court said in a scathing assessment of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) investigation of the Delhi Excise Policy case, discharging all 23 accused, including Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia.
Citing a fundamental failure in the investigative process, special CBI judge Jitendra Singh sharply criticised the investigating officer (IO), expressing a profound “dilemma” regarding the presentation of the case, questioning whether the criminal design existed in the conduct of the accused or in the “manner in which the material has been presented by the investigating officer”.
The court was particularly disturbed by the IO’s treatment of public servants like former deputy excise commissioner Kuldeep Singh. Despite the investigation yielding no admissible material against him, the IO arrayed him as a primary accused, the court noted. The court recommended “initiation of appropriate departmental proceedings against the erring investigating officer for framing A-1 (Kuldeep Singh) as an accused in the absence of any material against him”.
The IO was further criticised for a “calculated stratagem” dubbed “anticipatory manipulation”. This involved keeping individuals like the former Excise Commissioner (Arva Gopi Krishna) in the column of ‘suspect’ while simultaneously “presenting the very same person as a prosecution witness”. The court found this approach a “conscious abuse of official position” designed to keep the prosecution’s narrative fluid and protect the investigator rather than uncover the truth in the excise policy case.
Kejriwal case: Manipulation of timelines
The court found that the IO deliberately misrepresented dates in the excise policy case chargesheet to create an illusion of “undue haste”. Specifically, the IO claimed a vital petition regarding cartelisation was received on 5 November 2021, when official records proved it was received on 8 November. The court noted that this “advancement of the date” was an attempt to artificially support the allegation of haste.
Furthermore, the IO was found to have engaged in “misleading projection of record” regarding corporate structures. The chargesheet presented partnership compositions from late 2021 as if they existed in September 2021. The court ruled that this “departs from the contemporaneous record and tends to mislead by omission of a crucial temporal distinction” to support a conspiracy theory.
Approver-turned-accused
The IO’s handling of the principal approver, Dinesh Arora, was described as a major procedural lapse. The court noted that the IO recorded as many as seven statements from the approver over a span of one and a half years. These subsequent statements were used to “fill gaps, improve the prosecution narrative, implicate additional accused” after the grant of pardon.
Most disquietingly, the court found the agency misrepresented facts to the court by claiming they had not received a copy of the approver’s statement when the IO had, in fact, signed for it on the day it was recorded.
The court also slammed the IO for “suppression by obscurity”. Vital legal opinions from former Chief Justices of India were not presented clearly but were buried inside what the judge called an “email dump” of more than 14,000 communications. It observed that material described as “vital” was presented in a manner where it was “liable to remain unnoticed”, comparing the search for it to finding a “needle in a haystack”.
Institutional overreach and prejudicial labeling
The court ruled that the IO engaged in an “unwarranted expansion of the net” by conducting a “self-conducted audit of election spending” in Goa. This was deemed an exercise of power not vested in the IO by law, as such matters fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Election Commission.
Additionally, the IO was criticised for using the phrase “South Group” to describe a set of accused. The court termed this “arbitrary”, “divisive”, and “manifestly inappropriate”, noting it lacked any foundation in law and risked “appealing to bias rather than reason”.
The investigation was found to be structurally biased through selective prosecution. The court noted that individuals who operated organised cash-transfer networks (angadiyas) were not charged but were instead “converted into prosecution witnesses” to implicate those higher up.
The court concluded that the IO failed to proceed with the “candour, neutrality and unwavering fidelity to the factual record” required by law, ultimately reducing the process to a “self-serving exercise”.
In its final determination, the court concluded that the investigation was an “unwarranted expansion of the net in the absence of evidence”. The order reflects that the IO failed to proceed with the neutrality and fidelity to the record required by law, ultimately leading to a case that “collapse(d) under its own weight”.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)