Suspended IAS officer Rajendra Kumar, who has alleged that CBI wanted him to implicate Arvind Kejriwal in a graft case, today accused the Centre of protecting people who are tarnishing the image of the agency, and said he will take a call within next three months on whether to join politics.
He also wondered why no FIR has been registered in the suicide of former director general in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs B K Bansal and his family, while the same was readily done in the case of a private payment system company being allegedly cheated. A former principal secretary to Kejriwal, Kumar was suspended after being arrested and charge sheeted by CBI in the graft case. He recently sought voluntary retirement from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).
Kumar told PTI in an interview that joining politics was among the options he was "weighing", apart from NGOs and private companies of public spirit and that he will take a decision in the next three months. Asked about which party he would pick, Kumar said, "This question will come when I am clear about which of the option I am to exercise. "I have said that if politics is the path I choose all the parties are options, be it AAP, BJP or Congress." An IAS officer of 1989 batch, Kumar is an alumni of IIT Kharagpur and was recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Public Administration for 2006-07.
Kumar, who had held several key positions in the previous Sheila Dikshit government, was charged by CBI of corruption and criminal conspiracy for favouring a private IT company in awarding government contracts worth Rs 9.5 crore. On his allegations made against CBI in his VRS application, Kumar said that he wanted to bring out clearly what are the problems "with our institutions and where they have been abused by people in power". "I have been definitely threatened, verbally abused but not physically abused. But there are many other people including the co-accused who have been physically abused, thrashed and some of them have got permanent physical injury also," he said.
Kumar said the major issue was how "these people are so important" that an institution like CBI and the government which controls it are "willing to take down their own name just to protect them".
"It is very strange. CBI as institution is an inanimate organisation. It's the people there and if people who behave in such a manner are let off scot free and also protected so much so that the name of CBI and the government is itself going down then why are these people so important? "As a system we did not have courage to register FIR (in the Bansal case). If that is the system then a lot of things are very very wrong, especially when the same system can register FIR based on the complaint of Paytm that five people have cheated it," he said.
CBI has already rejected Kumar's allegations.
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