New Delhi: A month before he was due to retire, IPS officer Satish Verma — who was part of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed to probe the Ishrat Jahan encounter case in 2004 — was dismissed from service on 30 August by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
An IIT Delhi graduate and alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, the 1986-batch Gujarat cadre officer is one of half a dozen IPS officers who have been dismissed in connection with corruption charges slapped against them in the past eight years since 2014, ThePrint has learnt.
A senior IPS officer close to Verma said the latter had already moved the Supreme Court, challenging the dismissal order.
Earlier, he had challenged the dismissal in the Delhi High Court. But the latter, in an order dated 7 September, gave its approval to the ministry to proceed with the dismissal.
The HC, however, had added that the order should not be implemented till 19 September, “to enable the petitioner to avail of his remedies in accordance with law against the order of dismissal”.
On 15 June 2004, Ishrat Jahan, a 19-year-old college student from Maharashtra, and three others were shot dead in a police encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The police claimed that the four were Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives who were planning to kill then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. However, the Gujarat High Court formed an SIT to probe the encounter.
The SIT, with Verma as one of its three members, had said in its 2011 report that the Ishrat Jahan encounter was ‘fake’. Then, in 2014, Verma was transferred out of Gujarat. He was made an inspector general in the CRPF and was posted in Tripura.
Two years later, he was posted as the chief vigilance officer (CVO) of North Eastern Electric Power Corporation Limited (NEEPCO) in Shillong, Meghalaya. The charges against him include using the NEEPCO premises to talk to the media about the Ishrat Jahan case. In 2021, he was posted as the principal of the CRPF’s CTC.
However, he has not been promoted and his pay grade has not changed since the government initiated disciplinary proceedings against him post-2014.
He is currently posted as the principal of the Central Training College (CTC) of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in Tamil Nadu in the rank of inspector general, at pay grade level 14.
However, officers junior to him have now reached the rank of director general and pay grade levels of 16 or 17. Levels 16 and 17 are the pay grades of the country’s seniormost IPS officers.
Verma was also charge-sheeted by the MHA. According to an order of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), Principal Bench, Delhi, he has filed six original applications including two that were filed before the Guwahati Tribunal.
(Edited by Siddarth Muralidharan)
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