MUMBAI, 19 August 2007 — The image of the already demoralized and tainted Maharashtra police was further dented after a division bench of the Bombay High Court consisting of Chief Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud on Friday directed the State Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to question the Additional Director General of Police and Pune Police Commissioner Jayant Umranikar and directed him to be present for the next hearing.
The judges asked the ACB to submit a detailed report on the investigations into an extortion involving Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officials including Umranikar that took place when Umranikar was the additional director general of police of the CID.
The High Court issued the directive following the hearing of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking to expose the corruption that’s embedded in the state CID, filed by a lawyer Vineet Kanchan on behalf of Citizen’s Organization for Public Opinion, a nongovernment organization (NGO).
The petitioner highlighted how the state CID officers indulged in corrupt practices, while investigating cases and alleged that apart from Umranikar, the then Deputy Superintendent of Police Vithal Shinde, Police Inspector Ghanshyam Palange and police writer Daniel Salvi extorted around 300,000 rupees from travel agents.
The PIL in particular sought to show how Umranikar and his family had traveled to Delhi from Pune last April on air tickets bought by Sanjay Randive, a Pune resident, who runs a travel agency, after he was arrested by the state CID and sent to the Bund Garden police lockup in connection with a 2004 case.
The PIL details the case of Randive and states how the CID asked him to buy air tickets for their “top boss” to secure his bail. It also mentions the allegedly continuous demands of the CID officers, Shinde and others made to him. Umranikar had allegedly also asked for air tickets for a family holiday, while Shinde had sought return air tickets Mumbai-Boston-Mumbai for his son studying in USA.
Apparently Umranikar’s name was omitted by the ACB from the list of beneficiaries and the matter had raised a furor in the state legislative assembly as well.
The petitioner had sought directions from the high court to the ACB, Mumbai to conduct a probe into the complaints filed by Randive in June and July against the CID. It also sought to direct the ACB to seize all papers concerning the travel documents of the former additional DIG of the state CID.
Reports of how CID officers were accepting money from persons they arrested had been appearing in the media and was even raised in the assembly earlier this year. This resulted in an anti-corruption case being registered against Shinde and two other CID officers.
The involvement of senior IPS officers lately in several alleged graft and land dealings in which even the state Director General of Police P.S. Pasricha was targeted but later cleared by a probe panel has exposed the nefarious activities of senior police officials and the uncontrolled corruption that prevails in the state police force.
“All the probe will end in clean chit given to the tainted police officials, thanks to their proximity to politicians and ministers, who are hands in glove with the corrupt police officers,” said a former IPS officer.
