Chandigarh: “You may have forgotten the oath you took while joining police service, but I have not forgotten the oath of the Constitution I took while joining the cabinet,” Haryana Home Minister Anil Vij thundered before ordering the suspension of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Rohtash Singh.
This, and other such outbursts, have earned Vij earned the moniker of ‘Gabbar’ from Sholay. Government officials, it is learnt, began to use the name in private conversations largely because of the minister’s tendency to use dialogues from the film in informal conversation, as well as on Twitter.
The latest incident Thursday during a review of the action taken on a three-year-old police complaint filed by a woman from Kirori village in Hisar district. She had alleged that a man from her village had sprayed her wheat crop spread across two acres of land with a poisonous substance, damaging it completely.
Vij had asked Rohtash Singh to take action in the case during a 13 January meeting of the District Grievances and Public Relations Committee at Hisar. However, on Thursday, during another meeting of the committee, which Vij heads, the woman alleged that instead of taking action against the real culprit, the police had booked an individual who had only witnessed the incident.
However, it was not Rohtash Singh who was at the receiving end of Vij’s outburst Thursday. During the meeting, it was Singh’s successor, Barwala DSP Gourav Sharma, who faced the Haryana home minister’s wrath.
Rohtash Singh was transferred as DSP of the State Narcotics Control Bureau in the second week of May.
When an angry Vij sought an explanation from Sharma as to why no action was taken despite his order, the DSP said that according to the accused’s cell tower location, he was not at the spot at the time of the alleged offence.
“Do you think that you will narrate a story and I will be satisfied with your replies? You didn’t care about my orders. You concocted a story to hoodwink the process,” Vij shot back, and called for his suspension.
Other members of the grievance committee as well as some members of the public alerted Vij that Sharma was not the officer whom he had spoken to in January. The Haryana home minister then ordered the immediate suspension of the DSP’s predecessor Rohtash Singh.
When contacted, Vij said that during the last meeting of the grievance panel at Hisar, he had heard the complainant and after going through details, directed the DSP to take action.
“However, in a bid to save the accused, the officer implicated a witness of the complainant in a false case. When I asked the police to explain what action was taken on my orders given in the last meeting, they started narrating excuses,” Vij told ThePrint over phone Saturday.
At the Thursday meeting, Vij also ordered the suspension of two patwaris and one data entry operator in other cases. These suspension orders came close on the heels of the suspension of three sub-inspectors and a departmental inquiry against four station house officers for negligence in the investigation of an immigration fraud case reported in 2020.
Such instances are not new in the past eight and a half years of Vij being a minister of the Manohar Khattar-led BJP government in Haryana. He was health and sports minister in the first term. In the second term, he retained the health portfolio and was given home affairs.
Also Read: Haryana HM is making headlines with on-the-spot justice, but ‘without hearing the other side’
‘Lost count of how many I have suspended’
Vij concedes he doesn’t remember how many officials he has suspended, so far.
“Koi gintee nahi hai. Main to bahut jyada logo ko suspend kar chuka hu. Jahan bhi mujhe lagta hai ki koi karamchari jaanboojh kar apni duty theek se nahi kar raha. Janata ko pareshan kar raha hai, main bakshata nahi hu. (I have lost count. I have suspended umpteen employees. Whenever I find that an employee is purposely not doing their duty properly, or is harassing people, I don’t spare them),” Vij told ThePrint.
Asked if this was improving the situation on the ground, Vij replied in the affirmative. “When I suspend an employee, it sends a signal to others that if they are caught wanting in their duties, I won’t spare them if it comes to my notice.”
In April 2015, when Haryana heightened its campaign against the ultrasound centres conducting sex determination tests, Vij tweeted one of Gabbar’s dialogues.
मैं ऐसे हालात पैदा करना चाहता हूँ कि दूर दूर तक जब कोई लिंग जांच के अल्ट्रासाउंड सेंटर जाये तो डॉक्टर कहे भाग जा नहीं तो अनिल विज आ जाएगा ।
— ANIL VIJ MINISTER HARYANA (@anilvijminister) April 13, 2015
A month after that, he tweeted another dialogue of the iconic character when former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda commented that Vij wanted to become CM but has been made a ‘junior minister’.
भूपेंद्र हुड्डा ने कहा है कि अनिल विज CM के उम्मीदवार थे । मैंने तो कभी कुछ बनने का सोचा नही परन्तु यदि मैं CM होता तो तेरा क्या होता कालिया
— ANIL VIJ MINISTER HARYANA (@anilvijminister) May 23, 2015
Senior, but overlooked
When the BJP came to power for the first time on its own in 2014, Vij, a five-time MLA by then, was the senior-most leader in Haryana in terms of winning the maximum number of elections.
However, when it came to the formation of the Cabinet, Vij was sworn in after Khattar (then, a first-time MLA), Ram Bilas Sharma (four-time MLA), Captain Abhimanyu (first-time MLA) and O.P. Dhankar (first-time MLA).
In 2019, he got the all-important home portfolio along with health and family welfare since Sharma, Abhimanyu and Dhankar failed to retain their seats. However, in December 2020, Vij was divested of the Crime Investigation Department (CID), earlier a part of the home portfolio.
In 2019, the six-time MLA from Ambala Cantonment was given the no. 3 position in the Cabinet, behind Khattar and Dushyant Chautala who became the deputy CM.
“It looks like this can be the reason that he keeps doing things to make his presence felt and, in the process, sometimes causing embarrassment to the government and the CM,” the civil servant told ThePrint.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah snubbed Vij publicly in October 2022 when he interrupted him four times during his eight-and-a-half-minute speech at the opening of a workshop by the Union home ministry. “You were given five minutes. Your time is over,” Shah said.
In January this year, Vij lost two portfolios — Technical Education and Science and Technology — in the rationalisation of departments done by the Khattar government.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: Shared asset or ‘Punjabi heritage’? Iconic Panjab University at heart of new Haryana-Punjab row