Why Geetha hates Rajnish

Leena Misra / TNN / May 5, 2007, 02:54 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

Geetha Johri, returning as the chief investigator of the fake encounter case, and her colleague Rajnish Rai will not be working together.

AHMEDABAD: Geetha Johri, who on Friday returned as the chief investigator of the Sohrabuddin fake encounter probe, and her colleague Rajnish Rai, who arrested the disgraced IPS officers, would not be working together on the case. Perhaps just as well.
These two officers' conflict of interest goes back a long way when Rai as SP, CBI, Gandhinagar, had nearly booked Johri's husband, an Indian Forest Service officer from Gujarat, in a case involving the forest department giving a contract to digitise maps to a private agency, amounting to violation of national security.
Johri and Rai could never look each other in the eye after this case, pursued by CBI in 2000. "Naturally, then, the Modi government, which was already hassled by the progress made by Johri in the case, expected Rai to contradict her line of investigation," said a source.
But Rai, known to go by the book, took off from where Johri had left, which was establishing that Sohrabuddin's encounter was fake and looking for Kauser Bi.

He also went full steam ahead and arrested DIG D G Vanzara, SP Rajkumar Pandian and Rajasthan SP Dinesh M N and booked them for kidnapping, murder and destruction of evidence.
Johri is seen as an officer who would keep her bosses posted, while Rai is just the opposite. He did not inform his boss, additional DGP O P Mathur, about the high-profile arrests on April 24.
He even violated DGP P C Pande's letter to keep Mathur informed, and went ahead with a requisition for narco-analysis on Vanzara and the rest, before the metropolitan court.

Both Rai and Johri were sidelined by the Modi government and were not expected to act against the political establishment.
But Johri made some painstaking preliminary inquiry and submitted reports suggesting that the Sohrabuddin encounter was fake.
In cricketing terms, Johri built the solid foundation of the innings which allowed Rai to do some pinch-hitting.
However, Rai refused DGP Pande's suggestion that he should assist Johri with the investigations and proceeded on long leave on Thursday after the probe was handed over to Johri.
Had both Johri and Rai agreed to work together, it would have been a deadly combo.

About the Author

Leena Misra

Leena Misra is senior assistant editor at The Times of India, Ahmedabad. She has written on politics, crime, communal riots of 2002, people, city issues and a lot more. Loves all kinds of music, reading non-fiction and travelling.

End of Article