Some officers favourite for Nitish, others pariah

In July 2009, when a young woman was stripped publicly at the Exhibition Road in the State Capital, the then Senior SP of Patna, R Mallar Viji, who was considered to be an upright woman IPS officer, was shown the door.

Not only that, the IG (Patna), DIG and the City SP too got the boot in the major police shake-up within a few days of the incident. But in February 2012, when the then City S P Kim assaulted an elderly woman, she was let off by the power-that-be.

In Nitish raj, different yardsticks are applied to different people. It’s more than five days since a serious charge has been levelled against a DIG-rank officer Alok Kumar for seeking an extortion of Rs 10 crore from a liquor trader, but neither he has been suspended, nor any FIR has been lodged against him.

Rather much to everyone’s amusement, he has been shifted from Saran (where he was DIG) and asked to join police headquarters in Patna. Incidentally, R Mallar Viji, who was unceremoniously removed as Senior SP of Patna in 2009, has been made Saran’s DIG.

With no action taken against the accused DIG, questions are being raised whether Nitish had been fair in taking punitive action against the guilty officers or whether he is adopting double standards.

A section of senior police officers feel that in the case of the accused DIG, who is a 1997-batch IPS officer of J-K cadre and is on deputation, the only “eligibility” which saved him from being punished was his domicile.  He hails from Nalanda, the hometown of Nitish, and this is perhaps why he escaped the wrath of State’s top executive.

Or else, how could one explain that when the then City SP of Patna, Shivdeep Lande, raided a departmental store and some pharmaceutical companies, he was asked to pack his bags and sent as SP of Araria on Bihar-Bengal border.

Or for that matter, Ansuia Ransing Sahu, the woman IPS officer from Odisha, who took on mafias of Sheikhpura in central Bihar but was suspended last year on the charge of patronising stone chip mafias, guessing centres, massage parlour, gambling and extortion.

Officer’s choice

It’s not only IPS officers who are posted at the whims of those ruling the State. An IAS officer of Manipur cadre, Pankaj Kumar Pal, who joined Bihar in 2010, is at present DM of Bhojpur. But he allegedly faces triple murder charge in his parent cadre state.

Pal has been accused of killing Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) and his two sub-ordinate staff, when he was posted as Deputy Commissioner of Ukhrul in Manipur.

According to sources, Pal has been charged with the murder of SDO Dr Thingnam Kishan and his two subordinates Y Token and A Rajen. When the Manipur government, after the preliminary inquiry, found the charges against the IAS officer true, it placed him under suspension on February 19, 2009.

The Manipur government further instructed Pal not to leave Imphal headquarters without the permission of the Chief Secretary (Order of Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms, Government of Manipur, No. 4/25/2003-IAS/DP).

But strangely enough, Pal denied all these charges and joined here as the district magistrate of Gopalganj in 2010.

But all officers are not that lucky. Former Minor Irrigation Commissioner S S Verma and ex-DGP Narain Mishra’s houses were confiscated for amassing less than 2 crore which they earned in their 35 years of service.

But the one who reportedly demanded Rs 10 crore as ‘extortion’ is roaming free, although Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi is on record to have said: “We had received complaints about Alok earlier too when he was Senior SP of Patna but the investigations could not be carried forward.”