Scambuster Narain unsurprised at Advani verdict

Scambuster Vineet Narain, who exposed the hawala scandal in 1993, says he is not surprised by the discharge of top political leaders on Tuesday by the Delhi high court.

''During the last fifty years since Independence the Central Bureau of Investigation has not been able to catch a single corupt politician or bureaucrat at the top,'' Narain told United News of India.

Narain said it was after a prolonged struggle and the pressure from the Supreme Court that the CBI was forced to take action against the hawala recipients, but this was done in a half-hearted, reluctant and dubious manner.

Being a major scandal involving both Congress and Oppostion parties, nothing was heard about it in Parliament, Narain said.

A former television journalist, Narain said he had always maintained in his petition that the ''CBI is incapable of handling a case of this magnitude in which its own political masters are involved.''

Narain said he would wait to see if the CBI would oppose the verdict in the Supreme Court. If it does not, he said he would file a special leave petition on his own.

He demanded that an independent cell on the pattern of the Watergate investigation be set up. ''If not after all the exposure on corruption in high places, the people were going to completely lose faith in the system with the big guns now going scot-free,'' he added.

In Narain's view the CBI had failed and ended up ''making a defence of the accused,'' by:

1) not making an attempt to collect evidence through raids or custodial interrogation;.

2) one of the CBI lawyers, a Mr Natarajan, had during the investigation declared that he was not in favour of prosecuting the accused on the basis of entries in the Jain diaries, but was still allowed to plead in the case. The other lawyer, Narain claimed, had limited experience in handling criminal cases; and

3) the CBI ''malfidely'' filed only one first information report clubbing all 115 transaction of bribes when each transaction constituted a distinct offence. Also, they avoided registering cases under clauses dealing with habitual bribing of public servants.