Scam casts a shadow over spotless career

PUNE: Quiet, polished and reserved — That is how people describe Mumbai police commissioner R.S. Sharma, who is currently in the eye of a storm over his role in the investigations as Pune police commissioner, into the multicrore-rupee fake stamp paper racket.
Many police officers in the city, however, clearly felt that it was quite unlikely that a “clever officer� like Sharma would get caught in a controversy like this in the last year of his service.Sharma, a native of Punjab, belongs to the 1968 batch of the Indian Police Service.
Before joining the police force, Sharma spent five years in the Indian Army as a short service commission officer. Sharma’s postings included that of joint police commissioner (Mumbai) in 1995-98, when he handled the case of music director Nadeem (of Nadeem-Shravan fame), one of the accused in the killing of ‘Cassette King’ Gulshan Kumar.
He also handled several other posts in Mumbai. Prior to posting as the Pune police commissioner in 2001, Sharma was heading the Nagpur commissionerate, where he handled the agitation pressing for statehood for Vidarbha.
He was also deputed to the Special Protection Group (SPG), New Delhi, providing security cover to (late prime minister) Rajiv Gandhi for six years.
According to sources, it was here that Sharma established useful political contacts, which stood him in good stead in the race to the Mumbai commissioner’s post.
Sharma took over as Mumbai police commissioner on January 1, 2003, despite the fact that he had only 11 months left before retirement and after superseding 12 senior officials, police sources said. But most of those who worked with him in Pune remember him as a person who seldom lost his cool.
“He always saw to it that citizens were happy and went out of his way to ensure that their problems were solved,� said one officer who worked with Sharma. Undoubtedly the ‘stamp scam’ would be the only blemish in what has been a bright career so far.
It was not once but twice that Sharma was connected to the investigations into the racket — the scam flourished in 1995 in Mumbai, when Sharma was joint commissioner (crime), and again in 2002 as chief of the Pune police which took up investigations into the case.