What the Central Bureau of Investigation Actually Is

In one line

India's premier investigating agency has no statute of its own; it is the Delhi Special Police Establishment constituted under an Act of 1946, renamed by a Home Ministry Resolution of 1 April 1963, and every power it exercises comes from that Act.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Central Bureau of Investigation is not a statutory body created by any Act called by that name; the force in law is the Delhi Special Police Establishment constituted by the Central Government under section 2 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act 1946, and the name Central Bureau of Investigation was given to the organisation by the Government of India's Resolution No. 4/31/61-T/MHA dated 1 April 1963, as the Supreme Court recited in Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226; the offences it may investigate are those notified by the Central Government under section 3, its powers outside the Union territories rest on an order under section 5 and the consent of the State under section 6, and its superintendence and administration are governed by section 4 as substituted in 2003.

The fact to open with

Search the statute book for a Central Bureau of Investigation Act and you will not find one.

The Act is the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act 1946, Act 25 of 1946. Section 2(1) empowers the Central Government to constitute a special police force to be called the Delhi Special Police Establishment for the investigation, in any Union territory, of offences notified under section 3.

The name came thirty-nine years later than the force and by a Resolution, not a law. In Vineet Narain the Supreme Court set out the history and recorded: the Central Bureau of Investigation was established on 1 April 1963 by the Government of India's Resolution No. 4/31/61-T/MHA, to meet the need for a central police agency at the disposal of the Central Government to investigate not only bribery and corruption but also breaches of central fiscal laws, frauds in Government departments and public sector undertakings, and other serious crimes.

Three consequences follow, and every one of them is examinable.

Everything the agency does, it does as the Delhi Special Police Establishment. A first information report is registered by that Establishment, an arrest is made under the powers section 2(2) confers, and a charge-sheet is filed by officers of that force. The words "Central Bureau of Investigation" have no operative legal effect at all.

Its jurisdiction is therefore the Act's jurisdiction, and the Act begins in the Union territories. Chapters 810 and 820 show how it gets out of them.

And its existence rests on an executive Resolution, which is precisely the ground on which the whole organisation was challenged in 2013: chapter 900.