December 16, 2012
A 23-year-old physiotherapist is brutally gangraped in a moving bus in Delhi. The case is cracked within five days.
December 13, 2001
An audacious attack is carried out by Pakistan-based terrorists on the Indian Parliament. They kill eight security personnel and a gardener. The case is solved and all accused arrested within 72 hours.
These two are among the few high-profile cases that former Delhi Police commissioner and Delhi Prisons’ Director-General Neeraj Kumar handled during his over three-decade-long career. He revisits a few in his second book, Khaki Files: Inside Stories of Police Missions.
As an insider’s account of some of the most daring cases in India, Khaki Files talks about the investigation into one of India’s biggest lottery frauds to a foiled ISI attempt to kill two founding members of Tehelka.
Kumar had earlier penned Dial D for Don: Inside Stories of CBI Missions. A winner of Police Medal for Meritorious Service and the President’s Medal for Distinguished Service, Kumar was the head of the anti-corruption and security unit of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).
He has represented India at the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime in Vienna and at the drafting session of the UN Manual in Countering Kidnapping and Extortion.
How did you go about Khaki Files – choosing stories to recollecting the investigation process and penning it all down?
Khaki Files has a happy mix of stories drawn from my entire career. The criteria for selecting the stories was, are these worth narrating and worth listening to? I remembered the broad framework of the stories but my colleagues, who worked with me on these cases and are still in service, provided the details.
How challenging is it to investigate high profile cases with mounting pressure from press, politicians and public?
Quite challenging. Investigating a crime like gangrape requires a lot of focus and undisturbed attention. Unnecessary criticism and enquiries are big distractions for any professional work.
In the preface, you write “we are adept at police bashing, but always fail to acknowledge their good work”. Your views?
It is in our nature to be anti-police. Perhaps, a hangover from the colonial days when the British rulers used the police to put down any dissent by Indians with a heavy hand. The general image of the police has not improved since we became independent because enough has not been done to do so.
What does the word “creative” mean for a cop?
While doing his work, it means how he succeeds in achieving his goals through innovation and out-of-the-box thinking.
Introduce us to your family.
My wife has her own theatre group, Nepathya and stages plays regularly. Our elder daughter is an accomplished Kuchipudi dancer and lives in London with her banker husband and a six-year-old daughter.
The younger one is a pianist and a film writer from FTII, Pune. She presents piano concerts in Delhi and elsewhere. She has a three-year-old daughter and lives in Delhi.