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Gujarat riots investigator wants to quit IPS

Rahul Sharma had submitted a CD carrying call data records of important state functionaries and leaders of right-wing groups like Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad before Justice Nanavati Commission

Ahmedabad: A dutiful Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who had saved the life of 200 Muslim children in a madrasa in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar during the bloody communal riots in 2002 and had accused the Narendra Modi government of harassment has applied for early retirement.

Though Rahul Sharma (50) has cited ‘personal reasons’ for seeking retirement in his letter to the home department, the incidents in his life in the recent past clearly indicate that he was harassed by the state administration.

After the death of his wife in August 2013, the IPS officer, who has been dumped in an insignificant post of deputy inspector general (DIG), Armed Units, Vadodara, had requested that he be posted at any post in Ahmedabad or Gandhinagar till June 2015 so that he could attend to his son’s education and look after his ailing mother. But the state government rejected his request.

Sharma, who gave critical evidence before the Nanavati Commission probing the state’s communal riots on the call records of people in high offices, had written several letters to the state government in the last 15 months pleading that he be transferred or allowed to go on leave but all his appeals were rejected. His retirement letter comes just a day after the Nanavati Commission submitted its final report on the riots probe to chief minister Anandi Patel.

Sharma had submitted a CD carrying call data records of the important state functionaries and leaders of right-wing groups like Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which also described the movements of those leaders during the violence, before Justice Nanavati Commission.

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