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'The CBI sabotaged the case'

Sheela Bhatt in Bombay

Pran Nath Lekhi, counsel for the Rashtriya Mukti Morcha, is unhappy with the judgment in the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha case.

He told rediff.com in a telephone interview from his office in Delhi, "I am not satisfied with the judgment. You must remember that 9 people have been acquitted. These people should have been convicted, but they successfully escaped conviction thanks to the way the CBI conducted the case. When the witnesses were turning hostile, why did the CBI not prove that the witnesses who are turning hostile had a motive, those people have accepted voluble consideration for retracting their statements?"

"The CBI," Lekhi added, "was more keen to sabotage the case and was not interested in proving the charges. This makes me dissatisfied and sad. The CBI's conduct gave confidence to those who escaped conviction to repeat their act. They can once again disregard parliamentary norms and morals. Please note that this was not an ordinary case like an inspector accepting money from the violator of a traffic rule or getting sanction for a building plan subverting rules. Here was the complete subversion of parliamentary morality."

"The judgment is incomplete," Lekhi felt. "The issue under consideration was fundamental. It was related to Parliament's ethos. What do we accept from the people who get elected on our votes? Do they get elected so that they can disregard parliamentary morals?"

"I am not looking at the judgment from the prime minister's office angle," he concluded. "Look from the broader angle. The correct view is that the judgment has created a partial history, and you are writing history on the basis of a partial report."

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