Days after the arrest of Kadapa MP Y S Jaganmohan Reddy in the assets case against him, the youth in every nook and corner of the state formed associations in support of an IPS officer who played a key role in dealing with the case which involved alleged looting of public wealth by some persons at the helm of affairs. This was around the same time when anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare was hogging the limelight with his anti-corruption movement.
For the next couple of months, the IPS officer hogged all the limelight of the media, political parties and civil society which backed him.
The IPS officer, VV Lakshminarayana, ended his stint in the CBI with the same charm even as controversies surrounded him. The officer had to face some embarrassing days with the campaign involving his call data record leakage but he never went back in the manner he dealt with the cases. Though the CDR issue made his popularity graph take a slight dip, it did not dither him from making his moves at the right time.
With Lakshminarayana going after Jagan and others involved in the case, Jagan’s newspaper brought the call data record of the CBI JD and accused him of sharing the probe details with only some section of media. The detractors of Lakshminarayana also brought out the names of certain individuals to whom the CBI JD reportedly spoke over telephone which caused some embarrassing moments for Lakshminarayana.
Though Lakshminarayana did not give much importance to the opposition criticism, he kept low for sometime and had to completely avoid coming before the media.
Lakshminarayana also had to face some challenge when the investigating agency’s probe pointed its fingers towards IAS officers.
Y Srilakshmi was named and arrested in OMC alleged illegal mining case, BP Acharya in Emaar case and LV Subrahmanyam, though not arrested, name figured in Emaar scam.
With the role of several other IAS officers was under CBI scanner, a section of IAS officers formed into a lobby, held meetings and even went on to indirectly threaten the government if the members of their fraternity were arrested.
Lakshminarayana was under immense pressure to spare IAS officers from being arrested. Finally, the names of some senior bureaucrats of the government like Manmohan Singh and Sameul did find place in the chargesheets but they were not arrested.