IAS officer is new MHA spokesperson

To restructure the dissemination of information, the home ministry has appointed an IAS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre, Dileep Raj S Chaudhary, as the ministry’s public face.

To restructure the dissemination of information, the home ministry has appointed an IAS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre, Dileep Raj S Chaudhary, as the ministry’s public face.

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Chaudhary, an additional secretary of the 1977 batch, oversees the ministry’s division handling Naxal management and was recently cleared to hold secretary-level posts in the central government.

The move comes days after Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi raked up home secretary G.K. Pillai’s references to David Headley implicating the Pakistani establishment, remarks that have since been reiterated by National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna.

This is the second time over the last decade that the home ministry designated an IAS officer as spokesperson. Former home secretary Kamal Pande had appointed an IAS officer P.D. Shenoy as ministry’s spokesperson in the NDA regime but the experiment failed.