Rakesh Asthana appointed Delhi Police commissioner
The Union government gave additional charge of the Delhi Police to Balaji Srivastava after the retirement of SN Shrivastava on June 30, and there was no indication at the time that the charge was temporary.
Director general of the Border Security Force (BSF) Rakesh Asthana, a 1984-batch Indian Police Service officer from the Gujarat cadre, was on Tuesday appointed the commissioner of the Delhi Police, three days before he was to retire.
File photo of Rakesh Asthana.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
The Union government gave additional charge of the Delhi Police to Balaji Srivastava after the retirement of SN Shrivastava on June 30, and there was no indication at the time that the charge was temporary.
Asthana, who has previously headed the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), was exonerated in a 2018 bribery case registered by the then Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chief Alok Verma. He held the post of the special director in the investigative agency.
Asthana was moved out of CBI along with Verma on January 10, 2019, after a very public falling out of the two top officers of the agency that threatened to derail its functioning. He was the front-runner for the top job in CBI in May but was dropped after the Chief Justice of India, NV Ramana, pointed to a Supreme Court ruling that said no officer with less than six months of tenure left should be named to a top police job.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
{{^usCountry}}
Asthana was key in the unravelling of Indian Mujahideen’s strategy in Gujarat. As the chief of NCB, he was at the forefront of drug seizures and directed the probe into the influx of cocaine and synthetic drugs in the Mumbai film industry. And as BSF DG, he led the force at a time tunnels used by Pakistan-based terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab were busted.
{{/usCountry}}
{{#usCountry}}
Asthana was key in the unravelling of Indian Mujahideen’s strategy in Gujarat. As the chief of NCB, he was at the forefront of drug seizures and directed the probe into the influx of cocaine and synthetic drugs in the Mumbai film industry. And as BSF DG, he led the force at a time tunnels used by Pakistan-based terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab were busted.
{{/usCountry}}
Senior IPS officer Balaji Srivastava took over as the 23rd commissioner of the Delhi Police earlier this month. Srivastava, a 1988 batch IPS officer, served as the director general of police in Puducherry and Mizoram. As a special commissioner in Delhi Police, he led special cell, intelligence and economic offences wing.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather major national developments and Karnataka Bandh LIVE.
Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather major national developments and Karnataka Bandh LIVE.
