Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar won't resign over protests

NEW DELHI: Amid growing demands for his sacking, Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar is unperturbed. At a press meet and subsequent TV interviews, the controversial IPS officer maintained his resignation wouldn’t help matters and defiantly asked journalists if their editors resigned for the reporting errors they made.

Sporadic protests have broken out in the city in the last few days since the details of the rape and brutalisation of a five-year-old girl has emerged, a few months after the country recoiled in horror at the brutal gangrape and subsequent death of a girl in a moving bus in December. Many protestors, most notably activists of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, are demanding the police commissioner’s scalp, for the failure of Delhi Police to admit complaints and promptly probe. To add to his woes, Kejriwal and colleague Prashant Bhushan alleged Kumar had links with controversial arms dealer and Navy War Room leak case accused Abhishek Verma.

They distributed letters purportedly written by Verma’s former partner Edmonds Allen and former bureaucrat MG Devasayaham to senior government officials, complaining against Kumar. He denied the allegations and said they were false and motivated and done at the behest of persons he had probed against during his tenure in CBI. He said he will sue Bhushan and Kejriwal for defamation. Kumar, who has three months to retire, put up a brave face when he met the media on Monday, the first time since the child’s rape was reported. He said calls for his resignation were politically motivated. The real problem was the depravity and mental sickness in society, he said.

“That problem will not be solved by somebody resigning, least of all the leader of the force,” he said, offering to resign a “thousand times” if his resignation could stop such crimes from occurring. Home Secretary RK Singh has meanwhile received the inquiry report regarding alleged negligence by the Police in the matter concerning protestors storming the house of Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde last week and the heckling of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Yojana Bhawan. Through it all, Kumar is holding on to his job.