Just as the high-power selection committee decides on the new Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) director, a Superintendent of Police (SP) has lashed out at the interim director, accusing him of misconduct.
SP T Rajah Balaji has accused acting director M Nageswara Rao of misusing his position while transferring him out of Anti-Corruption Branch in Delhi. Balaji claimed that he was posted at CBI headquarters on humanitarian grounds as his mother-in-law suffers from cancer is being treated at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the city.
He told the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) that his transfer was motivated by his complaint against Rao’s “misconduct” in May 2017 to the then agency director, Alok Kumar Verma.
“My last transfer order was issued on August 1, 2018 in pursuance of a request from myself to then-Director CBI for a posting in any branch in New Delhi so as to enable my wife to be better placed to provide care to her mother who is a cancer patient in AIIMS, New Delhi,” his two-page note said.
It added that the Union Minister of Urban Development and Housing Affairs had helped him get accommodation in East Kidwai Nagar, close to AIIMS.
“It is known fact that I had complained about your misconduct to the then Director CBI vide letter March 11, 2017,” Balaji said in a letter to Rao, adding, “and subsequently when you served me with a memo, your misconduct was set out in more explicit terms by me vide letter May 2, 2017. Now you have abused your official position to service your personal sleepless malice and prejudice against me at the expense of institutional and public interests.”
However, the CBI says Balaji has not made any representation before the interim CBI director. “The representation dated 22.01.2019 as reportedly submitted by T. Rajah Balaji, SP, CBI about his transfer, as mentioned in media reports, has not yet been received in the Office of Director, CBI,” said a spokesperson from the agency, “As and when it is received through proper channel, appropriate action as per rules will be taken. It may further be mentioned that Balaji has been transferred to Ghaziabad, which is part of the NCR only.”
Quoting the Bard from Henry V, Balaji said in his letter, “There is some soul of goodness in things evil/Would men observingly distil it out.”
In the letter dated January 22, a day after his transfer to CBI Academy in Ghaziabad, which came among the mass change in postings ordered by the acting chief, Balaji chastised Rao saying, “You have no honour.” He urged him to “redeem” his humanity by reviewing his transfer order. “I am an eternal optimist about humanitarianism,” he wrote in the letter, a copy of which is with DNA, “I readily admit (I) do not have the intelligence to distil good out of you. I request you on purely humanitarian grounds in the hope that you can truly make a start to redeem your humanity. It is never too late in life to become a good man again.”
The SP also questioned the spate of transfers by Rao. Balaji says in his petition to CAT that “no review of branches was done” before ordering the transfers, which were issued under cover of darkness on like “other such transfer orders issued in recent times in CBI, particularly after the Central Government entrusted you (Rao) with the charge.”
