A Garland Of Words Unravelled
In a first for Bihar and India, an IPS officer serves a legal notice against a sitting minister. ANAND ST DAS tracks down the sequence of events that led to the confrontation.

State Urban Development Minister Bhola Singh Photo: Sunil Kumar

The politicians of Bihar’s two ruling parties have spent much of the NDA government’s last three years alternately sulking and shouting about officials who disregard their suggestions and orders. Indeed, an ‘inflexible officialdom’ is the persistent pet peeve even of several ministers in Nitish Kumar’s cabinet. However, ruling politicians’ steady tirade against police and civil officials received what appears to be a far-reaching jolt when one upright police officer dared, resolutely, to confront a senior minister.

Assistant Inspector General (Inspection) Dr Paresh Saxena, a 1994-batch IPS officer widely known for his professional integrity and achievements, gave Bihar’s leading politicians goose bumps when he served a legal notice on Urban Development minister Bhola Singh of the BJP as a precursor to a defamation suit. A deeply upset Saxena, a medical doctor by training, wants an apology from the minister for the insulting remarks Bhola Singh made about Saxena at a public ceremony in Gaya in September. This is the first time in India that an IPS officer has served a legal notice alleging defamation by a sitting minister.

In his speech, Singh obliquely but viciously reprimanded Saxena, then the SP of Naxalite-affected Gaya district, apparently because the officer did not come up to the podium to garland him. For years, garlanding ministers at public ceremonies has become the norm for police officers despite the State’s Police Manual mandating a salute as “the only approved form of paying compliments”.

Although Singh did not name any official in his speech, his outburst, much of which appeared verbatim in local newspapers, is clearly against Saxena. Parts of his outburst indirectly cast aspersions on Saxena as a leader of the district police force. In his address meant, purportedly, to inaugurate the annual Pitripaksh Mela, a festival of Hindu rituals performed to pay tribute to departed souls, Bhola Singh started off with sentences such as, “Those undeserving of the posts of officers cannot maintain discipline in the force,” and, “If senior officers forget democratic values, how can they bring discipline to the force?”

Even though Saxena’s legal notice, in itself, carries little real threat for Bhola Singh, a veteran heavyweight in Bihar politics, the symbolism behind the senior IPS officer’s step and its undeniable long-term implications have given the state’s top politicians reason for serious concern. Saxena’s legal notice and his calm determination to carry the issue on to a logical conclusion ‘in the public interest’ have given an unambiguous signal that it would no longer be easy or even possible for the people’s elected representatives to have their way with officers by swearing at them, bending the rules or banishing the officers altogether.

More importantly, if the minister refuses to apologise and a case alleging defamation is contested in court, the proceedings could eventually expose the truth behind the allegations of a nexus between the murder of former Gaya MP Rajesh Kumar and Bihar’s controversial Speaker, Udai Narayan Chaudhary, who is said to have ties with Naxalites. Speaker Chaudhary is accused of Rajesh Kumar’s murder. A judicial examination of Saxena’s notice could, therefore, bring real trouble for the JD(U)-BJP coalition government.

The plainly uncalled-for nature of Singh’s outbursts and the Assistant Inspector General’s transfer to an insignificant post at police headquarters in Patna a week later — in violation of the two-year tenure stipulated by the Police Act enacted by the Nitish government — have fuelled speculations within both political and police circles that the minister’s anger could well be a camouflage to give some much-needed relief to Speaker Chaudhary, who sat beside him at that fateful ceremony in his home turf.

Chaudhary, the JD(U) MLA from Imamganj constituency in Gaya, is charged with the murder of former MP Rajesh Kumar, an LJP

AIG Paresh Saxena Photo: Sunil Kumar

candidate and Chaudhary’s political rival, on the eve of the January 2005 Assembly polls. Conveniently, for Chaudhary, this murder was called an act of Naxalite violence and investigations meandered purposelessly. Saxena’s supervision of the ongoing investigations threw up startling revelations. According to a highly confidential five-page supervision report prepared by Saxena and submitted to the Home Department in September, a copy of which is with TEHELKA, investigating officers did not try to nab any Naxalites, interrogate Chaudhary or conduct even the most cursory of investigations into Chaudhary’s role in Rajesh Kumar’s murder. Shockingly, the report reveals that police even destroyed crucial evidence in an apparent bid to protect Chaudhary.

The report describes Rajesh Kumar’s murder not as a Naxalite murder but as a political assassination. It states that Saxena discovered evidence that revealed that Chaudhary had strong links with Naxalites and used them to further his political objectives. The report recommended that the Speaker be interrogated via a questionnaire and that an investigation be conducted, in compliance with parliamentary processes, to ensure the speedy and fair completion of the investigation, as per a Patna High Court order.

As SP of Gaya, Saxena had cracked down on Naxalite violence and focused on identifying and snapping the mutually beneficial links between Naxalites and politicians. As his legal notice mentions, only five days before Bhola Singh’s outburst, Saxena had reprimanded a DSP at a police meeting for failure to take action as per the law against one Dhanraj Singh, a close aide of the Speaker, whose motorcycle was found to have been used by a band of Naxalites who gunned down six policemen in Imamganj in August. The legal notice served on Bhola Singh hints that Saxena’s public humiliation at a ceremony attended by the Speaker was a direct consequence of his action as SP of Gaya.

”With his reputation as a big mouth, the minister could be acting as a tool to help Chaudhary, who is close to the CM, either out of friendship or in return for the cabinet berth that he got after months of bashing the Government. The idea seems to be to get a senior minister to publicly rebuke an energetic and competent SP so as to demoralise him and his men, thus helping both the murder accused Speaker Chaudhary and the Naxalites,” said a police officer familiar with the politician-Naxalite nexus in Gaya. Saxena's supervision report also mentions that Chaudhary had met him personally in Gaya on 1 June 2008 and tried to convince Saxena that the slain former MP was first linked to, and later opposed by two outlawed insurgent groups in the district.

Despite the Opposition repeatedly seeking a CBI probe into Speaker Chaudhary’s alleged involvement in Rajesh Kumar’s murder, Nitish Kumar has rejected such demands as being politically motivated. While the CM is opposed to a CBI probe of ex-MP Rajesh Kumar’s murder, he has demanded that the CBI probe the recent encounter killing of Patna youth Rahul Raj in Mumbai, a situation which has predictably, led many to accuse him of having double standards and political motivations himself. TEHELKA has learnt that the Union home ministry recently sought details from the Bihar government about investigations into Rajesh Kumar’s death. His son, Sarbjit Kumar has pleaded with the Union Government for a CBI probe into his father’s death.

Even as Chaudhary faces recurrent allegations of links with Naxalites for narrow gains and as the Naxalites become more and more active in his constituency, IG (Patna zone) Sunil Kumar’s report to the State Home Department in May came as an indictment of Speaker Chaudhary. The report said there was no sign of the government’s much-touted anti-Naxal and pro-development programme ‘Aap ki sarkar aap ke dwaar’ (Your government at your doorstep) in Chaudhary’s Naxalite-infested constituency of Imamganj. Well-placed sources in the state police said Chaudhary used his influence to scuttle a probe against him after the alleged discovery of a letter written by him in 2000 to a Naxalite leader.

The Saxena episode also reflects the paradoxes emblematic of the opportunistic politics of Bihar. Deputy CM, Sushil Kumar Modi, earlier full of admiration for Saxena’s professional integrity, is now deafeningly quiet following his party colleague’s outburst and subsequent developments. When Modi was Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly while the RJD government was in power, he raised hell in the Assembly when Saxena, then SP of Samastipur, was transferred in May 2002 for defying a local RJD legislator who, according to Saxena, tried to pressurise him into framing a political rival.

Saxena has a history of confrontations with the ruling party’s politicians due to his refusal to countenance criminal elements, regardless of their political links and influence. He fell out of favour with the Rabri Devi government after he attached the properties of RJD legislator Prahlad Yadav in 2000 for the blatant support and refuge he gave to Prahlad’s brother, who was wanted in a murder case.

The IPS officers’ fraternity in Bihar seems content to take things lying down. Although Saxena now refuses to speak, sources in the police headquarters said he remains unwavering about the defamation suit despite his seniors trying to coax him into dropping the idea. While, as per regulations, he had sought permission from DGP DN Gautam and from principal home secretary Afzal Amanullah before serving the legal notice on the minister, he received no reply to his letters. A section of the IPS officers in Bihar sees streaks of departmental indiscipline in Saxena’s moves.

Speaker Udai Narayan Chaudhary Photo: Hardeep Singh

Ironically, the new SP of Gaya happens to be the wife of former Gaya SP Ravindran Shankaran, who was allegedly hit by local RJD legislator Bhagwatia Devi with her chappal (sandal) in 2001. While Shankaran failed to take any action against the MLA despite continuing in his post — he lodged an FIR but never submitted chargesheet — it was Saxena who, as Gaya SP, resurrected the case seven years later and submitted a chargesheet. When asked to comment on Saxena’s legal notice, the DGP, the Principal Home Secretary and Bihar IPS Officers’ Association General Secretary Bhrigu Srinivasan chose to remain silent.

Bhola Singh tells TEHELKA that he is yet to receive the legal notice. “What I disapproved of was an IPS officer’s disregard of public representatives who hold high Constitutional positions. If an officer personally dislikes any politician for being against the law, he must take action but he cannot show disregard in public,” he said. When asked about the stinging attack against Saxena in his address, Bhola Singh stated that while he took nobody’s name, “The legal notice is full of references to the Speaker, though it is addressed to me,” he said, laughing. It is unclear how Bhola Singh can claim knowledge of the contents of the notice and, at the same time, claim that he is yet to receive it.

Speaker Chaudhary declined comment.

The notice was sent on October 26 and on December 26, the mandatory 60-day waiting period before Saxena can file a defamation suit will have expired. However, much can transpire in the interim – either a peaceful conclusion or an ugly denouement. Alternatively, the entire controversy can just vanish with nary a trace, as has happened so many times before in Bihar.