On Monday, forty-eight hours after the Lok Sabha polls were declared, the Election Commission of India (ECI) replaced Kumar with Sanjay Mukherjee, who has now been made the Director General of Fire and Emergency services. This move had been made despite the state government naming Vivek Sahay as the new police chief.
A senior official of the West Bengal administration said, “The Chief Minister would have reinstated Kumar just after the conclusion of Lok Sabha elections, but as the ECI announced bypolls of four constituencies, he would have been transferred. So, top brass of the state administration decided that Kumar would be reinstated after the bypolls results on Saturday.”
In 2016, too, Kumar had been removed from the post in Kolkata ahead of the Assembly elections. The state government had also named Vivek Sahay as the new police chief However, ECI made Sanjay Mukherjee the DGP of West Bengal.
Rajeev Kumar, a 1989-batch IPS officer, has faced a number of controversies. Just before the 2016 Assembly polls, when he was the Kolkata police chief, Opposition leaders alleged that Kumar was tapping their phones.
The first posting of Kumar, who is from Uttar Pradesh, was as a sub divisional police officer in Chandannagar. The 58-year-old later became the Superintendent of Police of Birbhum.
In 2008, he was the joint commissioner of the Special Task Force of Kolkata Police. A government officer said that after Mamata Banerjee became the CM in 2011, she held “reservations” about Kumar. A senior police officer said top officials in the department were later “able to convince the Bengal CM of his efficiency”.
In January 2012, Kumar was appointed the Commissioner of the Bidhannagar Police Commiserate. After the Sarada chit fund scam broke out in 2013, Kumar was appointed to head the Special Task Force (STF) that investigated the case. His team arrested the accused — businessman Sudipto Sen and two of his associates — from Jammu and Kashmir in April 2013. Just a month later, the Supreme Court transferred all cases related to the alleged scam to the CBI.
On February 3, 2019, CBI teams visited Kumar’s residence to question him, alleging that he had tampered with ‘destroyed evidence and connived with accused persons’ as chief of STF, following which investigators of the central agency and Kolkata Police officers had a standoff. That evening, the Chief Minister initiated a dharna against the CBI.
“What gave them (CBI) the audacity to raid the house of the police Commissioner without a search warrant? Rajeev Kumar is one of the best police officers. He is not involved in the Sarada scam. He only headed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) which we had formed to probe the Saradha scam. This is a deliberate attempt to harass the Opposition,” Mamata Banerjee had said.