Bihar IAS officer files complaint against Nitish Kumar, top officials in forgery case

Patna: A disgruntled IAS officer on Saturday left the administrative machinery in Patna stunned when he reached a police station with a complaint seeking lodging of an FIR against Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, besides several top officials. Sudhir Kumar, a 1987 batch IAS officer, reached the Gardanibagh police station around noon and was allegedly made to wait for four hours before he was given a receipt of his written complaint. “The matter pertains to forgery. Those named in the complaint include people from top to bottom. I will not take any names”, the bureaucrat, who is at present a member of the state revenue board, told reporters. However, when repeatedly asked whether the chief minister has been named in the FIR, he replied with a categorical “yes”. Another official, whose name he admitted to have mentioned in the complaint was IPS officer Manu Maharaj, a former SSP of Patna who has since been promoted to the DIG rank and is at present posted elsewhere. The IAS officer, who is scheduled to retire early next year, had spent three years in jail after being named in a job recruitment scam until the Supreme Court granted him bail in October last year. He declined to divulge the details of his complaint, saying “it pertains to fraud and forgery of documents” and when asked how many people were approximately named by him, replied curtly “I don’t keep a count”. Nonetheless, he made the sardonic remark “look at the state of rule of law in Bihar where an IAS officer is kept waiting for four hours. No FIR has been lodged. I have been simply handed over a receipt of my complaint. The same thing had happened when I had gone to Shastri Nagar police station in March, with the same set of documents. My efforts to gather information about the progress with regard to the previous complaint, which included an RTI, proved to be of no avail”. Gardanibagh SHO Arun Kumar, who was approached for comments, said “the complaint has been received and sir (the IAS officer) has been given a receipt. All necessary legal action will follow”. He, however, declined to confirm that the chief minister’s name was there in the complaint, asserting “it is a matter of investigation. We cannot divulge the contents”. Predictably, Leader of the Opposition Tejashwi Yadav latched on to the matter, demanding a thorough inquiry into the allegations made by the IAS officer for whom he also sought adequate security. “The chief minister ought to come clean on this issue. He must not shy away from getting the matter thoroughly investigated unless he has something to hide”, the RJD leader told reporters. “Nitish Kumar used to chide me for not coming out with explanation. Now it is his turn”, Yadav said, in a tongue in cheek reference to his own name cropping up in a money laundering case four years ago, while he was the Deputy CM, which led his boss to break ties with the RJD and cross over to the BJP-led NDA.