The Supreme Court has done well to appoint an independent team under a retired judge of the court, Justice Indu Malhotra, to investigate the security lapse that occurred when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was stranded on a road flyover in Punjab for about 18 minutes on January 5. The Prime Minister was on a visit to Ferozepur when the incident happened, and he cancelled his programme after the blockade. The court acted promptly on a petition that sought its intervention in the matter. There was a breach of security and it was necessary to understand how it happened and who were responsible for it. But the incident was immediately politicised by both the central government and the BJP on one side and the state government and the Congress on the other. The Prime Minister suggested that there was a threat to his life, and there was a chain of charges and counter-charges from both sides.
The politics around the incident created a situation where it would be difficult to understand what exactly happened if there was no independent probe. Both the Punjab government and the Centre announced their own investigations. It is clear that these would only have been used to endorse their respective versions and to justify their political positions, without throwing much light on the matter. The central government issued notices to some state government officials even before its investigation started. The court asked the Centre what remained for it to do if the government wanted to take disciplinary action against state officers. The team also had as a member an official of the Special Protection Group (SPG) whose role itself had to be investigated.
The Punjab government had also decided that none of its officials was at fault before its investigation was even announced. In this situation, there probably was no option for the court other than to order its own probe. The court ordered the seizure of all records and communications pertaining to the incident by the Registrar General of the Punjab and Haryana High Court and set up its own four-member investigation team. It has also stopped the central and state governments from going ahead with their investigations. The committee’s brief is to find out the causes of the breach of security, fix responsibility for it, and to suggest measures to ensure that such incidents do not happen again. The committee has been told to submit its confidential report at the earliest, and hopefully, it will be made public. But it is unfortunate that the highest court has had to expend its time and attention on a matter that should have been addressed without politics and partisanship by the Executive.