by Deepal Trivedi
Ahmedabad: A case against a retired IPS officer which pertains to an incident in 1984 is raising eyebrows. An arrest warrant has now been issued against Kuldeep Sharma, known to be a vocal critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
Kuldeep Sharma has been accused of assaulting a Congress leader at the time. The former DIG of Gujarat had earlier accused current Union home minister and then Gujarat’s junior home minister, Shah, of accepting a bribe of Rs 2.5 crore to help bail out Ketan Parekh, who was involved in a Rs 1,600-crore bank scam in 2005. The bank in question was a Gujarat-based cooperative bank, and Shah was one of its directors.
Kuldeep Sharma, who was then additional DGP in the CID department, was hounded out of the police force after he began looking into the bribery allegations against Shah. He was transferred to the Gujarat State Sheep and Wool Development Department, where he became the first IPS officer, after 31 IAS officers, to serve as the department’s managing director.
Kuldeep Sharma is the brother of IAS officer Pradeep Sharma, who joined the Gujarat Administrative Service in 1981 as a deputy collector and was nominated to the IAS in 1999 at the seniority level of the 1994 cadre. He has served as municipal commissioner of Jamnagar and Bhavnagar and as collector of Kutch-Bhuj and Rajkot until his suspension in 2010. Pradeep Sharma had retired from service in 2015, five years after first being apprehended on corruption charges.
Pradeep Sharma was the Kutch collector post the 2001 earthquake and had earned the then chief minister Modi’s trust for various rehabilitation works. However, they fell apart and later Pradeep Sharma alleged that he was being hounded because he was aware of snooping on a young woman architect in Kutch, allegedly at the behest of Modi. He had even demanded a CBI inquiry against Modi for the alleged snooping. Pradeep Sharma claimed that he had introduced the architect to Modi when he was the collector in Kutch.
The retired IAS officer faces 15 criminal cases related to alleged illegal land acquisition, bribery and money laundering. He has spent close to six years in jail now. Earlier this year, a court in Kutch sentenced Pradeep Sharma to five years of rigorous imprisonment in connection with a 2011 case involving irregularities in the allotment of government land to a private company in Kutch in 2003-04.
A sessions court in Kutch has now issued a non-bailable warrant against Kuldeep Sharma and retired deputy superintendent of police Girish Vasavada.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
