Vasundhara Raje- Crusade On Curruption

CM Vasundhara Raje sets the Anti Corruption Bureau on corrupt civil servants.

- Rohit Parihar

CUFFS ON RAJASTHAN ACB OFFICERS ARREST IAS OFFICERS G.S. SANDHU, LEFT, AND NIRAJ K. PAWAN (ABOVE)

Rajasthan is different this year. May and June are the hottest months in the state’s desiccated climes, but this time around it is the ‘corrupt’—civil servants, politicians and their cronies—who are feeling the brunt of what may be the severest summer in decades. The past month has seen former Union secretary for financial services, Gurdial Singh Sandhu, and the state’s special secretary for health, Niraj Kumar Pawan, two influential bureaucrats during the tenure of former Congress chief minister Ashok Gehlot, land in jail on alleged corruption charges.

The two are part of an extended list feeling the heat from the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB), which is directly under chief minister Vasundhara Raje. “ I have told them to do what they understand to be correct,’’ Raje told INDIA TODAY on the extent to which she controls the ACB.

Sandhu, who retired in September 2015, was forced to turn himself in after the Supreme Court rejected his anticipatory bail petition, filed by former Union minister and senior lawyer Kapil Sibal on May 9. The officer, who spent eight critical years in Rajasthan’s urban development department between 1998 and 2013 (during two alternating terms of Gehlot), is charged with multiple offences, including ‘illegally’ leasing Jaipur Development Authority land worth Rs 125 crore to realtor Shailendra Garg in 2011.

V.K. Singh, inspector general of police, ACB, says, “Sandhu colluded with others, including two Rajasthan Administrative Service officers and perhaps even former urban development minister Shanti Dhariwal to hastily push through the orders, ignoring the objections.” Sandhu, however, denies the allegations. Dhariwal has been questioned twice so far.