Appointing honest CBI chief won't rid agency of all ills: Ex-Rear Admiral

Panaji: Picking an honest officer as the chief of CBI isn't a panacea to rid India's top investigation agency of all ills, especially when its lower rung officers are shoddy, corrupt and prone to political manipulation, according to retired Rear Admiral B.R. Menon, whose book on his legal battle with the CBI was released recently.

Speaking to reporters here, Menon, who is promoting his book in Goa, also "hoped" that the Rafale deal, which the opposition has claimed is linked to the removal of Central Bureau of Investigation Director Alok Varma, "is a correct deal" and that the Indian Air Force gets its fighter jets at the right time and the right price.

"The CBI head himself being non-corrupt is not enough. Even the people down below in the CBI, the Joint Directors, Directors, Additional Directors, Superintendents of Police should be non-corrupt," Menon said.

"So, if the top man himself is very good and non-corrupt, every officer in line must be selected in the same manner and trained properly. I think the CBI younger lot are so illiterate that when they come in a court of law, the case fails and that is a loss of face for the CBI. I would recommend training of CBI officers, which is a very important thing," he added.

Menon claims his trials and tribulations began during his last official stint as the Chairman and Managing Director of the Defence Ministry-operated Goa Shipyard Ltd in the mid-2000s when he was raided by the CBI and his bank accounts were frozen.

While he continued as the CMD of the Goa-based shipyard for a year despite the raid, his book "Honesty victimised, CBI politicised" is an account of a 13-year-old struggle to exonerate himself from the CBI chargesheet and the trial which ensued.

Menon claims that the CBI is used by politicians from the states as well as the Centre and that values which a common man ought to attribute to an elite national agency do not exist any more.

He added that in his case the CBI did not have the courage to withstand political pressure, which forced it to prosecute him.

"I could not agree to many small requests which came from very big Ministers. Those are the reasons why it all added up to a situation like this," Menon said.

The CBI, he said, has a shortage of officers and the agency should use its resources to target the "big fish".