LUCKNOW: Sensing a repeat of the BSP’s historic win in 2007, a rather unlikely scenario, the UP cadre IAS and IPS officers are all set to resume battle to reassert their ‘identity’. They are even raring to take on the state government!
Interestingly, during the last four-and-a-half years since Mayawati wrested power in the state, the civil servants and their police counterparts maintained a studied silence and did not dare to utter a single word.
The IAS lobby’s deafening silence continued even when a senior IAS officer of the principal secretary rank Harminderraj Singh committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Also, the IAS Officers’ Association chose to look the other way when Mayawati suspended several officers in a whimsical manner. Moreover, the CM’s refusal to hold the IAS Association’s annual meeting and her trenchant criticism of the IPS officers elicited only a muted response.
Meanwhile, the growing friction between the members of the state’s IAS and the IPS officials is attributed to a minor incident in Basti district. Divisional Commissioner Anurag Srivastava while acting on a report by the District Magistrate chided an SP, Mohit Gupta, during a meeting in January for reviewing the poll preparations. A “humiliated” Gupta stormed out of the meeting and promptly reported the matter to his seniors, who convened a meeting in Lucknow. The meeting decided to mount pressure on the UP government for taking action against the Divisional Commissioner.
Meanwhile, the IAS lobby also got into the act and backed the Divisional Commissioner, but in a muted manner.
But in order to save the situation from getting out of hand, especially on the eve of the Assembly elections, the UP Government transferred both the officials and ordered an inquiry into the incident by senior IAS officer V N Garg and IPS officer A K Gupta. The probe report blamed Anurag Srivastava and Mohit Gupta for the unsavoury incident.
Presently, the UP IAS Association and the UP IPS Association have seized on this incident as a means of reasserting their organisational identity. “This is most unfortunate, that the UP IAS Association does not have a president or a secretary and it is lying defunct,” said one IAS officer while talking to Express.