Jharkhand Opposition parties seek ouster of three top officials, cripple Assembly’s budget session

The Opposition parties have been pressing for the ouster of chief secretary Rajbala Verma, DGP DK Pandey and additional DGP Anurag Gupta on corruption allegations.

PATNA: Jharkhand Assembly witnessed uproarious scenes during the ongoing budget session for the third consecutive day on Friday as the Opposition parties kept demanding the removal of the three top officials facing serious charges.

Even as MLAs of the Opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), Congress, Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (JVM) and CPI(ML) kept raising these demands, Chief Minister Raghubar Das made it clear that there was no such proposal under consideration before his government.

The Opposition parties have been pressing for the ouster of chief secretary Rajbala Verma, DGP DK Pandey and additional DGP Anurag Gupta from their respective offices on the basis of the allegations of corruption and dereliction of duties they face.

While Verma, who is due for retirement in February, was issued a show-cause notice by the state’s BJP government on January 4 for her alleged role in the fodder scam case, the DGP has been accused of mishandling the investigations into the Bakoria fake encounter case. ADGP Anurag Gupta faces allegations of using unfair means to influence the Rajya Sabha polls in 2016.

“JMM, which ran governments of father and son in Jharkhand, has no right to point fingers at us. They (JMM) had appointed a tainted official as the state’s chief secretary,” said Raghubar Das in a hard-hitting attack of the main Opposition party. He was referring to former Jharkhand chief secretary Sajal Chakraborty, who was sentenced to five years imprisonment and a fine of Rs 4 lakh by a special CBI court in a case of the Rs 1,000-crore fodder scam on November 22 last.

Chakraborty was first convicted in a fodder scam case in July 2008 and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for four years and six months. But Jharkhand High Court acquitted him in 2012, which ended his four-year suspension from service. He was appointed as chief secretary by then chief minister Hemant Soren of JMM in May 2014 and served till January 2015, when Das removed him.

Despite the uproar, the government, however, managed to table the third supplementary budget of Rs 1,738 crore. The four Opposition parties said later in the day that they would not allow the Assembly to function till the government removes the three “tainted officials” from their posts.
 

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