Bengal government reinstates Rajeev Kumar as state police chief

Kolkata: The West Bengal government on Monday announced that IPS officer Rajeev Kumar had been reinstated as the state police chief.

Although Rajeev Kumar was appointed as the acting Director General of Police in December last year, he was removed from the post before the Lok Sabha elections this year following an order of the Election Commission of India (ECI).

Sanjay Mukherjee, an IPS officer of the same 1989 batch, was appointed as the DGP instead.

However, with both the Lok Sabha election and bypolls for four Assembly constituencies being over and the model code of conduct being no longer applicable, Rajeev Kumar was reinstated in the top police post.

Mukherjee goes back to his earlier post of Director General, Fire Services.

Rajeev Kumar’s name had figured in controversy with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) accusing him in the Supreme Court of tampering with the electronic evidence in the multi-crore Saradha chit fund case. The opposition leaders in the state have often accused him of phone tapping.

In February 2019, the CBI sleuths attempted a raid at Rajeev Kumar’s official residence when he was the Commissioner of Kolkata police, following which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sat on a sit-in demonstration at Esplanade in central Kolkata. Before the 2016 West Bengal Assembly election, Kumar was removed as Kolkata Commissioner of Police by the ECI. However, again he was reinstated in that chair after the victory of Trinamool Congress in those polls.