The hot gossip on Rabindranath Tagore‘s birth anniversary this year is the CBI investigation into the bard’s Nobel Prize theft.

It has been a long 18 years. On March 25, 2004, Tagore’s Nobel Prize, comprising of the Nobel medal and the Nobel citation were stolen from the museum on the Visva-Bharati University campus in Santiniketan. The articles were stolen from the safety vault of the museum.

Several other personal belongings of the poet were also stolen along with his Nobel Prize. In December of the same year, the Swedish government presented the Visva-Bharati University two replicas of Tagore’s Nobel Prize. One was made of gold, the other of bronze.

The CBI got into the investigation immediately. But after 18 years, there is nothing much to show for it.

Pradip Bauri, a Baul singer from Bengal’s Birbhum district, was arrested in November 2016 for his alleged involvement. The scheme was supposedly masterminded by a Bangladeshi national, Mohammed Hossain Shipul, and two Europeans were also involved. However, nothing has been recovered to date.

In fact, the CBI never finished its investigation. Surprisingly, it told the court that since there has been no noticeable progress, the investigation was being closed; it would be reopened only if it could get credible leads. In this way, the matter of the Nobel Prize theft was sort of covered up.

A Rs 10-lakh reward, taking the help of Interpol – nothing has helped.

So lovers of the bard and his works have a pertinent question: If the CBI cannot solve the case, why is it keeping it to itself still? Why isn’t it willing to hand over the investigation to some other agency or state government?