The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is the domestic crime investigating agency of India. It operates under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions. Originally set up to investigate bribery and governmental corruption, in 1965 it received expanded jurisdiction to investigate breaches of central laws enforceable by the Government of India, multi-state organised crime, multi-agency or international cases. The CBI has attracted numerous controversies and criticisms due to various reports of irregular practises, excessive political influence, and a poor conviction rate. CBI is exempted from the provisions of the Right to Information Act. CBI is India's officially designated single point of contact for liaison with the Interpol.
Lal Krishna Advani is an Indian politician who served as the 7th Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004. Advani is one of the co-founders and a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He is a long time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a volunteer organisation. He is also the longest serving Minister of Home Affairs in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government from 1998 to 2004. He was the Leader of the Opposition in the 10th Lok Sabha and 14th Lok Sabha and also the longest serving person of this post. He was also the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP in 2009.
George Mathew Fernandes was an Indian trade unionist, statesman, and journalist, who served as the 22nd Defence Minister of India from 1998 until 2004. He was a member of Lok Sabha for over 30 years, starting from Bombay in 1967 till 2009 mostly representing constituencies from Bihar. He was a key member of the Janata Dal and the founder of the Samata Party, now led by Uday Mandal its President. He held several ministerial portfolios including communication, industry, railways, and defence. In 2020, he was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award.
Tehelka is an Indian news magazine known for its investigative journalism and sting operations. According to the British newspaper The Independent, the Tehelka was founded by Tarun Tejpal, Aniruddha Bahal and another colleague who worked together at the Outlook magazine after "an investor with deep pockets" agreed to underwrite their startup. Bahal left Tehelka in 2005 to start Cobrapost – an Indian news website, after which Tehelka was managed by Tejpal through 2013. In 2013, Tejpal stepped aside from Tehelka after being accused of sexual assault by his employee. Tehelka had cumulative losses of ₹66 crore (US$8.3 million) till 2013, while being majority owned and financed by Kanwar Deep Singh – an industrialist, a politician and a member of Indian parliament.
Bangaru Laxman was an Indian politician. He was a member of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was President of party from 2000 to 2001 and served as a minister of state for railways in Government of India from 1999 to 2000. He was sentenced to four years in jail for defence deal corruption case.
The Hawala scandal, also called the Jain Diaries case or the hawala scam, was an Indian political and financial scandal involving payments allegedly sent by politicians through four hawala brokers, namely the Jain brothers. It was a US$18 million bribery scandal that implicated some of the country's leading politicians.
The Barak Missile scandal was a case of alleged defence corruption relating to the purchase of Barak 1 Missile Systems by India from Israel. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigated the case and several people including the Samata Party ex-treasurer R. K. Jain were arrested. Others named in the First Information Report (FIR) included politicians George Fernandes, Jaya Jaitley, along with arms dealer and ex-naval officer Suresh Nanda, who is the son of retired Chief of the Naval Staff S.M. Nanda. The CBI investigated the case and filed a First Information Report (FIR) on 10 October 2006. On 24 December 2013, after investigating for more than seven years, the CBI decided to close the case as it did not find any evidence on the allegations.
Prashant Bhushan is an Indian public interest lawyer in the Supreme Court of India. He was a member of the faction of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement known as Team Anna which supported Anna Hazare's campaign for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill. After a split in IAC, he helped Team Anna form the Aam Aadmi Party. In 2015, he made several allegations against the party's leadership, its functioning and its deviation from the core ideology, values and commitments. He is one of the founders of Swaraj Abhiyan and Sambhaavnaa, an Institute of Public Policy and Politics.
The cash-for-votes scandal was an Indian political scandal allegedly masterminded by then Opposition Party Bharatiya Janata Party politician Sudheendra Kulkarni in which the United Progressive Alliance, the majority-holding parliamentary-party alliance of India led by Sonia Gandhi, allegedly bribed Bhartiya Janta Party MPs in order to survive a confidence vote on 22 July 2008. The vote in the Lok Sabha arose after the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front withdrew support from the government, who wanted to pursue an Indo-US nuclear deal.
Operation West End was the first sting operation done by Tehelka in 2001, an Indian news magazine known for its investigative journalism. It was done in order to expose the defense deals of the then ruling party, the NDA led by BJP.
The 1984 anti-Sikh riots, also known as the 1984 Sikh massacre, was a series of organised pogroms against Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Government estimates project that about 2,800 Sikhs were killed in Delhi and 3,350 nationwide, whilst other sources estimate the number of deaths at about 8,000–17,000.
Uttar Pradesh NRHM Scam is an alleged corruption scandal in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, in which top politicians and bureaucrats are alleged to have siphoned off a massive sum estimated at ₹100 billion (US$1.3 billion) from the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), a central government program meant to improve health care delivery in rural areas. At least five people are said to have been murdered in an attempt to coverup large-scale irregularities. Several former ministers of then ruling party, Bahujan Samaj Party have been investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation
The Truth: Gujarat 2002 was an investigative report on the 2002 Gujarat riots published by India's Tehelka news magazine in its 7 November 2007 issue. The video footage was screened by the news channel Aaj Tak. The report, based on a six-month-long investigation and involving video sting operations, stated that the violence was made possible by the support of the state police and the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi for the perpetrators. The report and the reactions to it were widely covered in Indian and international media. The recordings were authenticated by India's Central Bureau of Investigation on 10 May 2009.
Sidharth Luthra is a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India. In July 2012, Sidharth Luthra was appointed as the Additional Solicitor General of India at the Supreme Court and represented the union and various state governments in matters relating to fundamental rights, electoral reforms, criminal law and policy issues. He resigned from this position in May 2014. He is the son of K.K. Luthra who was also a senior advocate and brother of senior advocate Geeta Luthra.
Dr Kanwar Deep Singh, also known as K. D. Singh, is an Indian businessman turned politician and Member of Parliament (MP), Rajya Sabha representing the All India Trinamool Congress, but first elected to the Indian parliament as a nominee of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. He is the founder and the former chairman of the Indian business group called Turbo Industries, whose name was changed and rebranded as the Alchemist Group in 2004. He was elected to lead the Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) between 2013 and 2014.
Jaya Jaitly is an Indian politician and former President of Samata Party, an activist, author and Indian handicrafts curator. She stepped down as party president because of the Operation West End controversy in 2002. In 2020 she was sentenced to 4 years in prison for her role in the Operation West End bribery case.
The Narada sting operation was a sting operation carried out by Mathew Samuel targeting high-ranking officials and politicians of the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). It showed several politicians and a high-ranked police officer accepting cash bribes in exchange for providing unofficial favors to a company.
ISRO espionage case involved discredited allegations of espionage made by Indian investigation agencies in the 1990s against some scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Indian intelligence agencies and the Kerala police arrested some senior aerospace engineers on charges of attempting to sell confidential documents containing deigns of indigenous rocket engine developed by ISRO.
The Delhi Liquor Scam, also called as the LiquorGate is an alleged political scandal concerning the Delhi Government, which paved its way through the introduction of Delhi's Excise policy 2021-2022. This policy brought in private firms and enterprise companies into the retailed liquor sectors. The allegations involve favour to the owners and shareholders of private sectors, waivers and reduction of license fee and creation of numerous licenses to all the new incoming enterprises, with exchange of bribery. The Excise policy 2021-22 created by the ruling Aam Aadmi Party, projected it as a reform in the excise and retail liquor sector, thereby boosting the revenue by Rs 9,500 crores. This policy mainly focused on moving out the retail sector, and making way to large private sectors and firms. The policy was structured by a group of ministers from the cabinet, and the draft was approved and accepted by the government on March 2021.
