NEW DELHI: Former IB special director Sudhir Kumar, due to be quizzed by the CBI in the Sadiq Jamal encounter case, has slammed the CBI for "leaking" stories to the media against senior IB officials.
"There is a need to introduce some sanity into the minds of those deviating from the central line of investigation: to establish whether the encounter was fake or genuine. We expect the senior-most levels of the political executive to take the initiative of calling the heads of CBI and IB and introduce a sense of moderation and sanity. This irresponsible demeaning of the national security apparatus should end," Kumar told TOI.
Questioning the over-exuberance of senior CBI officials to publicly question IB's operational details and methodologies in the Ishrat Jahan and Sadiq Jamal encounters, Kumar alleged that they were causing immense damage to the intelligence establishment — both domestically and internationally. "By subjecting our officers to public scrutiny, we are only discouraging IB personnel in the field from forwarding actionable inputs to the states for fear of being linked to consequences like encounters. Also, we are playing into the hands of the enemy states by exposing our operational tactics," he warned.
"Why should the entire gamut of intelligence tradecraft and operational nuances be put in the public domain? Such matters are to be strictly discussed discreetly without exposing the IB officers concerned," Kumar said.
The former IB official said he was also intrigued by the CBI's "leaks" to the media about his impending questioning. "I heard from the CBI last in November 2012, when it wrote to me asking if I was available for clarifications relating to the Jamal case. They said they would meet me in a week's time at my home in Bangalore. But I have not heard from them since," he said adding that ideally, the IB director version should have sufficed. "But even if they want to question individual officers, I am very much available," said Kumar.
Stating that "short-cuts" were not extraordinary where police actions in the normal course failed to be an effective deterrent, Kumar said such "short-cuts" were resorted to all over the world, particularly while fighting terror.
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