Buck stops with CBI over Warren Anderson’s escape

Amid the blame game in the Congress over letting Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson out of the country, it is emerging that the CBI was ultimately responsible for the situation.

While Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, the UPA government’s trouble-shooter, on Sunday tried to defend Arjun Singh by saying that he must have taken the decision (to move Anderson out of Bhopal) keeping in mind the law and order situation, former CBI director Joginder Singh told DNA that once a case is taken over by the CBI, nobody else has authority over it.

“It is a fit case to probe how bail was granted to Anderson at the behest of Bhopal superintendent of police Swaraj Puri on December 7, when the case was handed over to the CBI on December 6,” said Joginder Singh, who handled the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s watering down the charges against the gas tragedy accused in 1996.

Anderson flew out of the country on December 7, 1984. Documents show that senior CBI officials descended on Bhopal from Delhi on December 5 and a fresh FIR was registered on December 6 at 10am against certain Carbide officials. Since the Madhya Pradesh government had issued a notification to hand over the case to the CBI on December 4, and the agency took over the case on December 6, it was the job of the CBI to interrogate or detain Anderson, who landed in Bhopal by an Indian Airlines flight around 9.35am on December 7. By evening, he boarded a state government plane to Delhi, from where he flew back to the US.    

When DNA contacted the then CBI director JS Bawa on phone, he tried to evade the issue by saying the CBI took over the case in earnest on December 9 or 10 because of paperwork. But how could the state machinery grant bail to Anderson on December 7 when the CBI registered an FIR on December 6? “It’s an old case. I do not remember the exact dates,” Bawa said. Did the CBI question Anderson before filing the charge-sheet against him in 1987? Bawa said he retired in February 1985 and hung up.

A top CBI official posed the questions to DNA: if Anderson was not an accused in the gas tragedy case, why was he arrested in the first place and then given bail within a couple of hours? And, why was the CBI never allowed to question him either in writing or through other legal methods?

He said it feels like a “scam” that the CBI filed a charge-sheet against Anderson on November 30, 1987, without once being allowed to question him.

Sources say Arun Nehru, as internal security minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government at the Centre, handled the Bhopal case. PV Narasimha Rao was home minister, but not in charge of the department of personnel under which the CBI functions. Nehru refused to comment.