The suspension of Durga Shakti Nagpal, a young and diligent Uttar Pradesh IAS officer, was bad enough. For the state chief minister to justify the action with a string of arguments over some imagined slight on her part against a minority community makes it worse.
To take on its own official and make her a scapegoat while appearing to openly support criminal elements like the sand mining mafia makes it a clear case of malafide action on the government’s part.
Far from supporting an upright officer who acted against a well-entrenched mafia, such convenient clubbing of an unrelated event to punish her without a proper investigation may turn officers who constitute the administration into cynics at an early age. Also, the shortsightedness of the decision to discipline the official is testament to how a young chief minister, of whom so much was expected when he promised to bring in a whiff of fresh air into a state notorious for paying scant regard to rules and regulations, has failed.
The district magistrate’s report explaining the position on the planned construction and dismantling of an incipient place of worship should have, at least, led to a proper departmental inquiry into these events. The haste with which the government acted clearly reflects politics at work. A young officer cannot be expected to take her minister to court and must suffer in silence even as the system is hijacked by elements that are stripping natural resources without a thought for the harm it does to the environment.