IAS officer to peruse then Rohtak IG’s reply

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 16

The Manohar Lal Khattar government has appointed an inquiry officer to look into the reply submitted by Inspector-General Shrikant Jadhav, the only IPS officer suspended for ‘dereliction of duty’ during the Jat agitation for reservation in February last year.

Sources said the government, which initiated disciplinary proceedings against five IPS officers for their role during the Jat quota violence, appointed senior IAS officer TC Gupta, Principal Secretary, Monitoring and Coordination Department and Implementation of CM s announcements, last month to look into Jadhav’s reply on the allegations levelled against him.

Jadhav, then the IG, Rohtak Range, was castigated in the Prakash Singh Committee report (the Haryana government had set up a committee under former IPS officer Prakash Singh to construct the events that led to the violence) for calling in the then Jhajjar SP with his force to Rohtak at a time when caste-clashes were spreading in Haryana.

Further, after a protester was killed in retaliatory firing by the BSF in Rohtak, Jadhav, worried that the frenzied mob would go after him, had allegedly confined himself to his residence. A substantial chunk of the force was ordered to be deployed around his house when the city was burning. After setting Finance Minister Abhimanyu’s house on fire, the mob had arrived at Jadhav’s gate and set it alight. Sources claim there was stone-pelting at the IG’s residence which further substantiated his fears.

Countering these allegations, sources said Jadhav, in his reply, had stated that the movement of police from a peaceful district to a “disturbed” district was a routine exercise. He is learnt to have justified that if he needed force, he would not have tapped Jhajjar and relied on the personnel available in Rohtak itself.

Sources claimed that Jadhav had cited the inability of the Rohtak SP to move out of the Circuit House which had been gheraoed as the reason for his seeking more force from adjoining Jhajjar district.

It is learnt that he has mentioned that the goings-on were recorded in CCTV cameras and submitted his reply with all evidence to the government.

While he was first shifted out as IG, Rohtak Range, he was suspended subsequently but reinstated a day before the Prakash Singh Committee submitted its report in May last year on the Jat quota violence.

The 1994-batch officer was reinstated with effect from March 26 on technical grounds, subject to the final outcome of the departmental proceedings pending against him.