Mysuru: Mysuru’s Chamaraja Circle bore a quiet, weary look Monday. A small stream of vehicles made their way past the police barricades that had been propped up on alternate lanes of the roads leading away from the circle. The barricades were manned by just two policemen.
The quiet, mundane lockdown scene was a far cry from the chaos that had subsumed the district’s administration in the past few days — the result of a very public spat between Rohini Sindhuri, the district deputy commissioner (DC), and Shilpa Nag, the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) Commissioner, both IAS officers.
The conflict reached a head last Thursday when Nag tendered her resignation accusing the DC of “targeting” her. Sindhuri responded with a string of allegations criticising the corporation’s Covid management.
Last Saturday, the Karnataka government stepped in, transferring both officials out of the region.
All this unfolded even as Mysuru, along with Chikkamagaluru, continued to lead the state in terms of positivity rate, at 25. 22 per cent.
Officials of the district administration and the MCC, whom ThePrint met earlier this week, described the spat as being unexpected and unprecedented. According to them, they had seldom seen two IAS officers take on each other so publicly.
Nag accused the DC of hurting her mental peace and “humiliating” corporation staff.
“There is harassment and humiliation by the DC. I have had no mental peace, no proper sleep and no food for the past week. I have had enough,” she said, while announcing the news of her resignation.
“No district or city should have such an officer. She has been humiliating MCC staff and has threatened to suspend them.”
Sindhuri denied the allegations in a press note enclosed with a point-by-point list of allegations of how the corporation mishandled the Covid sitaution.
According to her, the corporation had been submitting unsigned and contradictory ward-wise Covid-19 figures on new cases, deaths and active cases, and had failed to open Covid care centres until recently.
“Both are good officers. When Shilpa Nag became commissioner, cases had started going down. The DC ma’am was also very good, she would keep reviewing until late night. It would have been good if they would have gotten along; the situation would have been different,” an officer in the district administration told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity.
How it began
Sources in the district administration indicated that the spat began brewing after Mysuru-Kodagu MP Pratap Simha began questioning the DC.
The BJP leader had on 22 May said that while the urban areas were showing a downward trend in cases, infections were on the rise in rural areas.
A corporation official, who is close to Nag, said that problems had cropped up between Sindhuri and the district’s political machinery.
“There were instances where she had been left out of meetings called by politicians and was not being communicated with,” the official said. “Even when the district minister in-charge (S.T. Somashekhar) would come to visit, he never sent any of the people to her office even once.
“The commissioner seems to have been dragged into all of this because a comparison was made between the handling of Covid in the city and in the rural areas,” she added.
The situation escalated when Sindhuri questioned Nag about the corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds that had been procured by the commissioner.
According to the official in the district administration, the DC was told that Nag was reluctant to release the funds to the district. The district administration then sent a letter seeking clarification on the funds.
Speaking to ThePrint, Sindhuri said the CSR funds were meant for the whole district and not just Mysuru city.
“I had also asked for the ward-wise count of Covid cases. She had failed to send that on time,” Sindhuri told ThePrint, “This is a war, you can’t have your soldier rebel against you in the war and act as a general to the enemy.”
She further alleged that Nag had been colluding with a few politicians to target her. “She didn’t appear for any review after that, she was so emboldened by the political backup, she needn’t have been held accountable,” the outgoing DC said.
ThePrint reached Nag through telephone calls; she refused to comment on the matter.
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A spat amid a rising Covid curve
The Covid situation in Mysuru had started to deteriorate by the end of April as the number of daily cases had climbed to over 1,500, according to the district’s Covid-19 War Room bulletin.
By mid-May, the positivity rate had crossed 55 per cent. By 29 May — a week into the spat — the district had 16,114 active cases, had recorded 1,729 cases and 28 deaths on that day. As of 11 June, there are 15,148 active cases.
But there has also been a discrepancy in the death toll.
According to the bulletin, the district was reporting between 5 to 30 deaths a day in May. The Mysuru war room’s data says the district had reported 470 deaths in May.
The corporation’s Statistical Officer Anil Christie, who is in-charge of disposing of Covid-19 bodies in the city, however, said that the number of Covid bodies that had been ferried to burial and cremation grounds in the city had amounted to 1,003 in the month.
All of this leads to the question of whether the spat between the two senior IAS officers in the district had a bearing on the administration’s Covid handling.
Several district administration and corporation officials that ThePrint spoke to were divided on the question.
“At the ground level everyone is working — the doctors, the karyakartas and the team, they are all working,” said a second official in the district administration.
“This happened only at the highest level…She (Sindhuri) was very good, she was ambitious that by the end of this month we should declare Mysore as Covid-free.”
An official in the district’s health department said the DC was a workaholic. “She would take inputs regarding how many cases there are, how we are screening them, how many vaccine doses were given, how many admissions happened, how many discharges happened etc. everyday,” the official said.
According to Mysuru’s acting Mayor Anwar Baig, the outgoing DC and Commissioner had been “working shoulder to shoulder” until they fell out.
“In a day they would meet twice — in the morning and then in the evening. They would work very hard and sometimes also go around in one car if they needed to go to some meetings or Covid centres,” he said.
After Nag had announced her resignation, Baig and other city councillors had held a demonstration urging the government to retain her as the commissioner.
Mysuru-based journalist T.R. Sathish Kumar said the squabble had no effect on the district’s Covid handling.
“The situation between the two IAS officers has not affected the Covid management because the system was already in place because it started Covid triage protocol from 1 May itself,” he said. “Probably Mysore was among the first places to start triaging as the physical triage centres — Covid Mitras — were set up on 1 May.”
Squabble that had political ramifications
The squabble has divided Mysuru’s political class.
BJP leaders, MP Pratap Simha and MLA S.A. Ramadas, insisted that Sindhuri’s “lacklustre administration” had been the reason why the Covid situation had gone south in the district.
“We were the highest in the entire state in terms of positivity rate, and as far as deaths are concerned, apart from Bangalore… What was she doing for the last three months?” Simha told ThePrint.
The BJP leaders also blamed the outgoing DC for the shortage of the drug Remdesivir.
“(Sindhuri) wouldn’t visit hospitals. Even in the office, she used to run everything from her home only,” alleged Ramadas. “Only in the evenings, she used to come to meet…. Shilpa was a very good administrator and had taken initiatives like a door-to-door survey.”
Sindhuri was also criticised by former MCC Commissioner K.V. Mallesh, JD(S) MLA Sa Ra Mahesh and MP Pratap Simha for constructing a swimming pool and a gym in the official DC residence as it is a heritage building.
Following this, the Karnataka government ordered a probe.
Sindhuri has, however, said that the construction of the pool was taken up by the Nirmithi Kendras, set up by the Rural Rural Development and Panchayat Raj in each district, as a demonstration of low-cost technology.
The district health department official quoted above said that Sindhuri had been caught in the cross-hairs of several politicians especially since she shut down 16 privately-run covid care centres.
“Many of them belonged to MPs and MLAs that would charge a lot of money,” the official said. “But these did not have oxygen or ramps and some were located in the basement that weren’t properly ventilated… Sindhuri wouldn’t tolerate anything that was out of the box.”
The opposition Congress, which has had run-ins with Sindhuri in the past, backed both officials this time around.
“Initially, Simha used to support Sindhuri but later on, he changed. To some extent, even Janata Dal (Secular) MLA Sa Ra Mahesh is also responsible for the fight between the two,” Congress leader Siddaramaiah said Wednesday.
“What was the district in-charge minister, S.T. Somashekar, doing when there was a fight? It’s a total failure on his part.”
Mysuru City Congress president R. Murthy told ThePrint that the BJP leaders were to blame for the fracas.
“This all happened unexpectedly around 15 days back when the MP had attacked the DC. When elected representatives belonging to the ruling party do this, how will the officials work?” he asked. “Shilpa Nag is a very good officer and the DC also everybody knows is very popular among IAS officers.”
No strangers to controversy
Both IAS officers, however, are no strangers to controversy.
In a career spanning 12 years, Rohini Sindhuri has been lauded on several accounts, including building over 1 lakh individual toilets as a part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in households across Mandya during her stint as the chief executive officer of the Zila Parishad in from 2014 to 2015.
But the 2009-batch IAS officer has been in the headlines before, especially when it comes to going head-to-head with the political machinery.
Since her transfer, Sindhuri has stirred up a hornet’s nest, claiming land grabbing by a few politicians had led to her transfer.
And back in 2018, she was “prematurely” transferred from her post as Hassan DC for cracking down on the sand mafia. The then-Siddaramaiah government allegedly shunted her out of the district following pressure from the local politicians.
Sindhuri had contested the transfer in the Karnataka High Court and won, following which she was reinstated as Hassan DC under the H.D. Kumaraswamy government.
Nag, a 2014 Karnataka cadre IAS officer had also made headlines in 2017 when she along with other senior bureaucrats were attacked during a raid of an illegal sand extraction unit in the Udupi district.
According to reports, Nag and her colleague, Priyanka Francis, had conducted the raid without informing the police and had to flee for their lives after the illegal sand miners attacked them.
(Edited by Arun Prashanth)
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