The central bureau of investigation’s application to supreme court seeking transfer of the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter trial outside Gujarat raises serious questions about the agency’s conduct. The application contains observations that are politically motivated, outrageously subjective, clearly beyond the agency’s ambit and completely untenable. As the country’s premier investigating agency, which is supposed to be independent but is increasingly implicating itself as a tool of the party in power at the centre, the CBI has outdone itself even by its plummeting standards.

Sample this: as reported by The Indian Express newspaper, the CBI has alleged that the “entire state machinery is complicit in committing these atrocious crimes”. But its application does not stop at making unsubstantiated allegations against the state machinery alone. It goes on to tarnish the entire state with the same brush. Gujarat, it claims, is “in a state of ascending disharmony and unrest between religious communities”. Therefore, it says, “The CBI would find it difficult to protect witnesses and instil confidence in the people of the state who would be otherwise willing to come forward to testify against the respondents.” The country’s premier investigating agency unashamedly states that it is “already in a minority and on the back foot”.

Since when has the CBI started gauging communal temperature as part of its duties? Would the same agency have made this assessment if the party in power in the state happened to be in power at the centre as well?

Even if all of the CBI’s allegations happen to be correct, it has no business to make such comments. Curiously, its comments have come at a time when it seems to have achieved considerable success in summoning the serving chief minister for interrogation in the same case. That alone qualifies as a leap in efficiency compared to its record with the likes of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, to say little of the murder most foul in Noida followed by an investigation most clueless.

The CBI had been brought in by the Supreme Court to probe “the alleged possibility of a larger conspiracy”. The agency, however, seems to have mistaken mud-slinging for investigation. The supreme irony is that the more strident the CBI, or its political masters in New Delhi, sound the more they are likely to end up strengthening Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi who can only gain from further polarisation. Even as its application damages the institution of the CBI further, therefore, it does not make for a good political strategy either.