Cop wins battle, made DGP year after retirement

AHMEDABAD: He always held his head high when battling an errant establishment. But Gujarat cadre IPS officer R B Sreekumar must have felt a few inches taller on Thursday when he was promoted as DGP on Thursday, a year after he retired.
The state government issued a notification on Thursday after two reprimands from the Gujarat High Court for not implementing its order of October last year to promote the officer.
The victory against the Gujarat government, which hounded him when he did not fall in line after the 2002 riots, was preceded by a series of legal battles that went on for over three years.
It was a moral victory for the police officer, who paid with his career for exposing the complicity of the bureaucrats, cops and political heads in the post-Godhra riots, when his colleagues kept mum and even spurned him for having spoken out against the establishment.
The delayed promotion means Sreekumar, who belongs to the 1971 batch of IPS, may have lost out on the perks befitting a DGP, but will get the salary dues. More importantly, he stands vindicated.
The promotion is effective from February 23, 2005, when his junior K R Kaushik was promoted as DGP, superseding him on grounds that he had a criminal case pending in a Kutch court from 1987. Sreekumar was discharged from this case in August last year.
Sreekumar became a thorn in CM Narendra Modi's side as chief of the state intelligence bureau in 2002. This officer not only refused to toe Modi���s line but reported Modi's speeches during the Gaurav Yatra in 2002 as ������inflammatory������, after which he was shunted to a sidelined posting.