E-Paper
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.
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.
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.
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.
