Top cop Neeraj Kumar still not off the hook

In a clear indication that the home ministry has not let Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar off the hook, Lieutenant-Governor Tejendra Khanna has been asked to examine findings of the one-man panel of Khurshid Ahmed Ganai. Aloke Tikku reports.

In a clear indication that the home ministry has not let Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar off the hook, Lieutenant-Governor Tejendra Khanna has been asked to examine findings of the one-man panel of Khurshid Ahmed Ganai.

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An additional secretary in the home ministry, Ganai had inquired into the Delhi Police's failure to handle protesters who heckled West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and entered the home minister's house in April.

Government sources said the Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde was unhappy at the slow pace at which the bureaucracy was processing the Ganai report submitted nearly a fortnight earlier. Ganai, on the other hand, was given just six days to submit the report.

Right from the handling of the mid-December brutal gang rape to the arrest of a Kashmiri militant on his way back to Jammu and Kashmir to surrender, the home minister had taken a dim view of the Delhi Police's leadership on several instances.

The tipping point, however, was the police's inability to protect Mamata Bannerjee's delegation outside the Planning Commission and Jat protesters ransacking Shinde's house last month.

The Ganai panel is understood to have attributed the ransacking of Shinde's house and SFI protesters heckling Bannerjee and her finance minister Amit Mitra outside the Planning Commission to lack of coordination within Delhi Police.

Neeraj Kumar - who is in the line of fire - has just about two months left of service, triggering speculation that there was an attempt to slow down processing of the Ganai report.

Sources said Shinde, however, was playing along for now.

"But he has issued written instructions that the file be processed quickly," a government source said, asserting it would be difficult for anyone to hold on to the file till Kumar's retirement.

If someone has made a mistake, it should not really matter if there was just a month left, the source said.