This can only happen in India. Saji Mohan, an IPS officer of 1995 batch (IPS is a class-I post in Government and Police Services comparable only to IAS cadre) was arrested, having 12kg heroin in his possession, from a hotel in Mumbai on the night of 24th Jan’09.
Interrogation of two men Vicky Oberoi and Rakesh Kumar arrested earlier on 17th Jan’09 with 1.8kg heroin had led to the arrests of Saji Mohan. During interrogation by Mumbai ATS they revealed that a senior police officer had supplied them the heroin for sale in Mumbai. K.P.Raghubansi, the head of Mumbai ATS, which is handling the case, said that Rakesh Kumar was a constable in Gurgaon.
Following the arrest of the two men, the ATS kept the incident under wraps and laid a trap to catch the IPS officer. Mohan has been booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Prevention) Act for possessing drugs and remanded to police custody till January’09.
The flip side of this story is that Mohan was a regional director Narcotic Control Bureau (NCB) for two years in Chandigarh and is said to have made record seizure of drugs. He also received gallantry awards and was known as ‘honest and upright NCB officer’ as per Raghubansi. But Raghubansi also said that, while posted in Chandigarh, Mohan used to manipulate the quantity of drugs seized and showed smaller quantities on official records and was running a racket in Mumbai to sell the seized drugs.
It has been coming to the notice of people that in general a number of senior officers are involved in corruption. About a month ago, CBI itself arrested a CBI officer Parthasarathi Basu while accepting a bribe of Rs.50000 in Calcutta. A raid conducted in his house resulted in unearthing of cash, ornaments, bank fixed deposit receipts, National Saving Certificates etc worth more than a crore rupees. Incidentally Parthasarathi Basu was handling the case of murder of Tapasi Malik in Singur episode. He was also related with Nandigram case and it is widely believed that Basu might have taken money from political bosses to malign CPI(M). Another CBI officer Mr. Sahai was also arrested and suspended from service for extracting money from some people under threat of booking them on murder charges. The Lalu Yadav fame CBI deputy director Upen Biswas (Retd) had a drug ring operating from the ground floor of his residence in salt lake in Calcutta.