Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is India's federal investigating agency. It grew out of the Special Police Establishment, set up in 1941 to look into corruption in wartime supply contracts, and took its present name in 1963. It works under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, and sits under the Department of Personnel and Training.

Its part in this history

The Khalra case. Punjab Police abducted Jaswant Singh Khalra at Amritsar on 6 September 1995. On 15 November 1995 the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to inquire into his disappearance. On 30 October 1996 the CBI charged nine Tarn Taran police officers, at first only with kidnapping and illegal confinement, and made no arrests; murder was added against three of them in 1997. On 9 December 1996 it gave the Court a final report listing 2,097 illegal cremations in Amritsar district. The Court sealed it and that month referred the cremations case to the National Human Rights Commission. On 18 November 2005 a Patiala court convicted six police officials.

Delhi, November 1984. In the Pul Bangash case, where three Sikhs were killed on 1 November 1984, a court refused the CBI's first closure report in late 2007. The CBI gave Jagdish Tytler a second clean chit on 2 April 2009, and a magistrate accepted the closure report in April 2010. In April 2013 a court set the closure aside and ordered the eyewitnesses examined, and in December 2015 it ordered further investigation. On 20 May 2023 the CBI filed a chargesheet alleging that Tytler incited a mob at the gurdwara. These are the CBI's allegations.

In the Raj Nagar case the CBI appealed Sajjan Kumar's 2013 acquittal. On 17 December 2018 the Delhi High Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the killing of five Sikhs and the burning of a gurdwara. He died on 20 August 2026.

The Sikh Reference Library. The government told the Rajya Sabha on 2 December 1998 that the Army handed some of the library's material to the CBI in July 1984, that the CBI returned it to SGPC representatives in October 1989, and that some documents were "Objectionable and thus destroyed." The SGPC disputes this. In 2000 Ranjit Singh Nanda, a former Punjab Police inspector on deputation with the CBI, said rare manuscripts, hukamnamas and books were taken to a youth hostel after Operation Blue Star, packed into gunny bags and trunks, and moved to an unknown place. A CBI spokesman denied the material was still with it.

Where it stands today

The Pul Bangash case rests on the CBI's 2023 chargesheet. The SGPC said in 2000 that it would ask the Prime Minister for the library's material, and the sources do not settle where it went.