A former top CBI officer, who supervised vital cases including the 1984 riots, has claimed that the agency — barring on a few occasions — never showed any motivation to fix culprits involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom.
Ahead of the launch of his book ‘Voice of CBI’, former CBI joint director M Narayanan told dna in an exclusive interview that an investigating officer, Satish Golcha, who knew Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, collected negative evidence to save Tytler instead of helping witnesses.
“When I became joint director, both cells investigating cases related to the 1984 riots came under me. I found nothing was moving there. They (Golcha team) were collecting negative evidence, threatening witnesses,” he said. He said officers told him that Tytler had visited the CBI office before the agency filed a closure report in court. “No investigation was conducted till 2008,” he said.
The former CBI officer said he tracked down two witnesses to the US with the help of Sikh organisations. Surender Singh was found in New York and Jasbir Singh in California. “When we recorded their statements in the US in August 2008, they named four more witnesses, two of whom, Resham Singh and Chanchal Singh, had heard Tytler telling his followers that there were only a few killings in his area and that it was a shame,” Narayanan said.
After he retired on January 31, 2009, Golcha took over as joint director and the agency again filed a closure report. “I don’t know how director Ashwani Kumar agreed to that. But, I feel, the new officer had managed him.”
To his dismay, the court accepted the closure report because Tytler’s video showed him at Teen Murti House and witnesses deposed after so many years.
Narayanan said Tytler might have been present at Teen Murti; but he could have slipped out of the other gate. And on the issue of witnesses deposing after so many years, the police had never allowed them to tell the truth.
Fortunately, on the petition of Lakhvinder Kaur, additional sessions judge Anuradha Shukla reopened the cases. Referring to the Ved Marwah committee report, Narayanan said even an officer of Marwah’s stature was pressurised into not filing his report. Tytler, who attempted to seek a stay first from the high court and then from the Supreme Court, failed.
The latest news from the CBI is that investigations are on.
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