Outgoing chief Srivastava appears to be paying the price for the Dantewada massacre.
In what seems to be the fallout of the Dantewada massacre in Chhatisgarh earlier this year where 75 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed by Maoists, the union government on Saturday transferred CRPF’s director general Vikram Srivastava.
He has been replaced by K Vijay Kumar, well known after leading the operations to eliminate forest brigand Veerappan.
Srivastava, a 1973-batch IPS officer from the Uttar Pradesh cadre, was appointed as the CRPF’s chief in February 2010. He has now been made the chief of the Bureau of Police Research and Development in Delhi.
“Srivastava had come under severe scrutiny after the Maoist attack in Dantewada in Chhattisgarh in April. His transfer seems to be a result of that,” a source said.
After the attack, the central government had formed a committee headed by E Rammohan, a former DGP of the Border Security Force, to inquire into the matter. The committee reported apparently says the CRPF operations are not being planned properly, as a result of which they became easy targets for Maoists.
K Vijay Kumar, Srivastava’s replacement, is a Tamil Nadu cadre IPS officer of the 1975-batch. Kumar shot to fame when he headed the Special Task Force (STF) for a long time, which hunted down and killed Veerappan in October 2004.
Veerappan, a notorious sandalwood smuggler wanted for a series of murders and other crimes, operated in the jungles of south India for nearly 20 years.
Kumar also headed the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy in Hyderabad and has had a stint in the BSF as an inspector heneral in Kashmir for two years. He has won the President’s Police Medal for gallantry.
The source added that Kumar’s appointment meant that he had superseded two senior IPS officers, Vijay Raman (1975-batch) and N K Tripathi (1974-batch), both of whom are presently posted as special directors general in the CRPF.
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