If the Central Bureau of Investigation's final report on Jagdish Tytler's alleged role in the anti-Sikh killings of 1984 is that there is no evidence to implicate him in the targeted attacks on Sikhs, it could serve to confirm the widely-held view that the CBI is a pliable tool in the hands of the government of the day.

The report, ironically, came after the court, in 2007, asked the CBI to re-investigate the case after a television news channel tracked down a witness who the CBI had said was untraceable.

Readers will recall that a few months ago, when the CBI changed its tune on the subject and told the Supreme Court that it had not been able to find any evidence to show that the Samajwadi Party chief, Mulayam Singh Yadav [Images], had amassed assets disproportionate to his known sources of income, the judge was so incensed that he said only God could help a country whose premier intelligence agency behaved in this manner.

The timing of the two reports would serve to strengthen the suspicion in many minds that the CBI is just politics by other means. The Tytler report has come at a time when the Congress has announced that he will be a party candidate in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections; the Mulayam Singh volte face came at a time when he had decided to support the United Progressive Alliance in the trust vote.

Given this background of a suborned CBI, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [Images] should be complimented on his decision to set up an independent directorate of prosecution. It should not surprise that the CBI has been opposing this proposal since, as of now, it does both the investigation as well as the prosecution.

An independent prosecuting agency is a good idea since it will put more pressure on the CBI to do a good job of investigation -- otherwise its shoddy work will be shown up in a way that does not happen now. The CBI will also have to convince the independent prosecutor of its case, something it did not have to do very strenuously when the prosecuting wing was an internal arm.

To try and ensure that the proposed new directorate is independent of political influence, the Prime Minister has proposed that its head be selected by a panel headed by the attorney general, and with the Central Vigilance Commissioner as one of its members.

This is an excellent idea, and the stated objective of independent functioning needs to be buttressed in other ways. For one, it is not clear how keeping the new prosecutor under the department of personnel and training will ensure its independence; a better idea would be to have the prosecutor report directly to Parliament.

For another, the Prime Minister should complete the process and follow up with the logical next step of freeing the CBI itself from the influence of the government of the day; this should apply to not just the manner in which senior officers, including the CBI chief, are selected but also to its reporting structure.

Especially in an operating environment in which politicians holding office are increasingly likely to have criminal records, or political friends and allies with such records, it is important to keep the law enforcement machinery independent of extraneous considerations.

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