The recent activism of the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), the chief anti-graft body in the country, is extremely troubling. The CIAA under its Chief Commissioner Lokman Singh Karki has been breaching its legal bounds with abandon. The new constitution clearly stipulates that the CIAA may conduct investigations into the activities of public office holders it suspects of corruption. It also has the right to bring court cases against them. The CIAA can also recommend to relevant government bodies, in writing, action against public office holders under its watch. Besides these it has no other powers. The CIAA, for instance, had no legal authority to summon the three Chief District Officers of Kathmandu valley and scold them for their supposed inability to control corruption. Or did it have the right to take the India-bound containers of Dabur Nepal, a private company, under its control, supposedly for 'wrong labeling' of its products? (The CIAA's jurisdiction is strictly limited to public organizations).The mode of its recent investigations is also problematic. The CIAA is supposed to conduct secret investigations into supposed wrongdoing of public employees and gradually build up its case based on those investigations. These probes are kept under wraps so that those being investigated cannot temper with incriminating evidence. So the recent trend of the CIAA declaring that it is going to investigate particular organizations on particular dates has raised many eyebrows. It has recently issued a public notice to the effect that it's stationing its personnel at the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) for next one month starting December 16th. The goal, supposedly, is to look into public complaints about various irregularities, poor services and inadequate infrastructure at TIA. But if the CIAA really wanted to catch TIA officials suspected of accepting bribes or ignoring their duties, surely, it would have secretly monitored their activities. Since all the TIA officials have now been alerted in advance, thanks to the CIAA public notice, all of them will be in their best behavior for the next one month. This makes one suspect that the real intent may not be to catch wrongdoers so much as to protect them.
On the same grounds, the very public investigations into 40-odd civil servants, including serving and former ministers, are iffy. On the CIAA hit-list are political figures who have been vocal about the indiscriminate nature of CIAA investigations and those who have from the start questioned the appointment of Karki—someone implicated by a government-appointed commission of suppressing the 2006 Jana Andolan—as its Chief Commissioner two years ago. Curiously, no one from Nepali Congress or Madhesh-based parties is on the list, even politicians widely suspected of corruption. Also left out is Ganesh Thapa, the former head of the country's football governing body, even though Thapa has already been slapped with a long ban by FIFA for misappropriating its funds in Nepal. In light of all these questionable CIAA activities, perhaps the time is right to start investigating the overzealous investigator itself.
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