IPS OFFICER DINESH M.N.-RARE DARING BREED OF INDIAN POLICE SERVICE
Notorious criminal Anandpal singh, who had troubled law enforcement agencies in Rajasthan for years, was on Saturday night killed in an encounter with police in Churu district. Two policemen were also injured in the encounter. Anandpal, who carried a reward of Rs 5 lakh on his head, had taken a shelter in a house near a highway.
Anandpal had managed to escape from custody of police while being taken back to high security prison in Ajmer from a court in Nagaur in September 3, 2015. Two cops were killed in the incident following which Rajasthan police announced a Rs 5 lakh reward on his head.
"He was alone in the house in Churu district and opened fire at police from rooftop when the police surrounded the house and challenged him. In the exchange of fire, he was killed," DGP Manoj Bhatt told PTI.
"On a pin pointed information, teams of the special operation group (SOG), the emergency response team and local police surrounded the house near Sardarshahar and asked him to surrender but he opened fire at the police," ADG ATS and SOG Umesh Mishra said.
The gunbattle lasted nearly 45 minutes as Anandpal, armed with Kalashnikovs, fired nearly 100 rounds. Two AK-47 rifles and 400 rounds of ammunition have been recovered from the encounter site.
According to police sources, he was staying in a home of one Shravan Singh. While Anandpal stayed on top floor of the house, Shravan's family stayed on the ground floor. Police have arrested Shravan for providing shelter to a criminal.
Before the encounter, Haryana police made a major breakthrough earlier in the day by catching Anandpal's brother Rupendra Pal singh and his aide Devendra alias Gattu from Sirsa district in the state.
Each of them carried a reward of Rs one lakh on their head.
Haryana police shared the details of Anandpal's whereabouts with their counterparts in Rajasthan following which the house was surrounded in Churu.
BACKGROUND OF BRAVE IPS OFFICE DINESH M.N.
Retired IPS officer D.G. Vanzara may blame "dirty politicians" for the seven years he spent in jail, but in Rajasthan, Dinesh M.N., inspector general of police with the anti-corruption bureau (ACB), has decided to put the past firmly behind him. He is concentrating instead on the future, and that lies in ensuring Rajasthan is rid of corruption. On April 4, he arrested Bharat Bhushan Goyal, sub-divisional magistrate of Shahpura, located on the Delhi-Jaipur highway, for accepting Rs 3.5 lakh as first instalment of a Rs 25 lakh bribe an entrepreneur was giving him to set up a manufacturing unit for ayurvedic medicines. Goyal's predecessor Gopal Singh Shekhawat too was booked, for demanding Rs 3.8 lakh more after having pocketed Rs 13 lakh earlier.
Every day, Dinesh and his team get information on hundreds of such cases of extortion, even though the government claims to have ensured transparency through e-auctions. A day after Goyal's arrest, it was excise inspector Puja Yadav's turn. She was caught accepting a bribe of Rs 40,000 from an allottee who wanted to set up a liquor vend he had won rights for through an e-auction in Bhilwara. The team recovered Rs 5 lakh and 19 bottles of liquor smuggled from other states from her residence. The next day, Dinesh arrested Ahmed, a middleman, and two officials of the Jaipur Municipal Corporation for taking Rs 70,000 in bribe to allow the construction of a house in posh Malviya Nagar.
Dinesh has been making enough of an impact for the Rajasthan High Court to take notice and enlist him to take action against the state-run Hingoria Cow Shelter, which had been running a fodder scam with impunity for over a decade. Dinesh arrested eight officials on March 30 and 31. A fortnight earlier, it was another holy cow-the Jaipur Development Authority-that Dinesh took on, arresting four of its officials openly demanding bribe at a camp held to regularise land in Jaipur.
It has been a long, personal battle for Dinesh to get where he is today. Detained in the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, his arrest and incarceration went largely unnoticed outside Rajasthan. All attention was focused on Vanzara, who was considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then the Gujarat chief minister. Dinesh was Udaipur SP when Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi were killed in an encounter in Ahmedabad.
Freed on bail in April 2014 because there had been no trial in the case till then, Dinesh was given a non-police appointment as director of the Rajasthan Small Industries Corporation. A year later, he was sent to the ACB, an assignment he accepted readily and proved worthy of when, three months on, he arrested Ashok Singhvi, principal secretary, mines, who was running an extortion racket with middleman Sanjay Seth. His new innings have struck fear in the heart of the corrupt civil bureaucracy. It elicited the charge that "he is Amit Shah's man (in Rajasthan) out to embarrass Vasundhara Raje". Shah and he were together in Sabarmati jail. Dinesh just laughs it off.
His name is now invoked regularly to put fear into officials asking for bribe. Several Facebook pages are dedicated to him-one has 29,000 followers. Another says it Bollywood style: "Dinesh MN, Real Singham." His fearlessness is perhaps his most redeeming feature but it has equally got Dinesh into more than his fair share of trouble.
A mentor of sorts, Sudhir Pratap Singh, additional director general, CRPF, recalls him as "an excellent officer who was always keen to work in public interest as probationer". He cannot fathom how the man got himself into "so much trouble". Singh was SP, Jodhpur, when Dinesh trained with him in the late '90s. He had already begun to emerge as a pro-people officer, but soon his seniors, bureaucrats and ministers figured out he could be ruthless in enforcing the law. He came to be seen as an officer who could be used in a crisis, dumped under political pressure and brought back for troubleshooting. In 2000, for instance, when he took on one of the biggest vernacular newspaper and TV groups accused of cutting cables of rival TV networks, he was shunted from Jaipur under political pressure and sent to the dacoit-infested Karauli district.
There, Dinesh went on to cleanse the ravines of 10 major dacoit gangs, methodically hunting down outlaws responsible for looting idols from the Timangarh Fort, annoying the local politicians who patronised such criminals. They accused him of not allowing dacoits to surrender. In 2001, Dinesh had told India Today: "I won't allow a surrender with garlands. Let them walk into a police station and do it." At that time, his friend and batchmate Biju Joseph, SP of the adjoining Dholpur district, also a hotbed of dacoits, had said: "He should be careful in taking away life even when law permits it."
Kavita Srivastava, secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, once impressed with Dinesh's accessibility and responsiveness, turned against him when he killed dreaded dacoit Ram Singh Gurjar, responsible for 25 murders and 30 kidnappings, in Sawai Madhopur. In May 2003, he was posted as SP, Jhunjhunu, to curb the liquor mafia patronised by the local politicians and to ensure peaceful conduct of assembly and Lok Sabha elections He succeeded, but then went after a gang of bookies. It infuriated a local Jat leader enough for him to pressurise Vasundhara Raje to get him transferred to a non-field posting. However, in August 2004, he was again requisitioned for riot control in Udaipur, his request for relieving him for deputation to the Centre rejected. Udaipur was to become his nemesis.
Seven years in jail have taken a toll, but failed to break him. He attributes it to his "discipline and self-assessment". "After the initial shock, I concluded that some things-like getting bail-were not in my control. I had to work on things that were, like my health, mental stability and physical fitness." His favourite companion in jail was Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning, the 1946 bestseller of the Auschwitz inmate. At Mumbai's Taloja jail from 2012-14, Dinesh would climb the 20-feet-high bars of his barrack 40 times in a go. At the Ahmedabad jail from 2007-12, he ran 5 km a day.
Dinesh still exercises relentlessly. Instead of guns, though, he now toys with documents to trap the corrupt. Says Jaipur lawyer R.A. Katta: "His presence has made officials less brazen in extorting bribes." At his office and modest official residence in Jaipur's Gandhi Nagar, he meets many complainants. His colleagues, other civil servants, are nervous. They shun him at social dos. It does not bother him. Seven years in jail have taught Dinesh M.N. how to turn solitude into an advantage.
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