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HomeIndiaRajender Singh, Delhi supercop who caught 'superthief' Bunty, on his greatest hits...

Rajender Singh, Delhi supercop who caught ‘superthief’ Bunty, on his greatest hits & a few misses

Known for work on high-profile cases including 2012 Delhi gang-rape, former ACP opens up on his career, what it takes to crack a case — and what he thinks of Shraddha Walkar probe.

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New Delhi: “Police officers are like shoes,” says famed former Delhi police officer Rajender Singh. “You look at a person’s shoes to know how they are. The same way, you come to know how a society is by looking at the police personnel responsible for it.”

Speaking to ThePrint at a time when the Delhi Police are under pressure to gather evidence and tie up high-profile investigations such as the Shraddha Walkar murder, Singh offered insights into what it takes to crack a case, and why sometimes even the best efforts fail.

His own 34-year-long career graph, though, features many more highs than lows. Starting out as a sub-inspector in 1986 and retiring as Dwarka assistant commissioner of police (ACP) in 2020, he played a key role in numerous cases that grabbed national attention, including the 2012 shooting of liquor tycoon Ponty Chadha, the 2009 Jigisha Ghosh murder, the 2010 Dhaula Kuan gang-rape, and the 2013 killing of Bahujan Samaj Party leader Deepak Bhardwaj.

His work has even been captured on screen — in Dibakar Banerjee’s 2008 blockbuster Oye Lucky Lucky Oye!, based on the nabbing of the notorious “superthief” Bunty Chor, and in the Netflix series Delhi Crime on the December 2012 gang-rape case.

For his work on the latter case, Singh also received the Home Minister’s Medal for Excellence in Investigation, adding to a long list of previous accolades, including a Medal for Gallantry in 1996 and the President’s Police Medal for Meritorious Service in 2004.

Yet, Singh’s first choice had always been to join the civil service and not the police. He was waiting for the results of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam when he got into the police and decided to join.

“When it happens, one thinks, it’s all gone wrong but later you realise that probably this was bound to happen because you are good at it,” Singh, who holds a law degree, says.

Over the years, Singh has come to believe strongly in a couple of principles. One is that public service is the most important aspect of the job.

“A police officer shouldn’t think of reporting to the headquarters or constantly bother about what seniors would think. Instead, the first and last job actually is public service,” he says.

His most fulfilling experiences as ACP, he adds, were when he was engaged in collaborative policing, which involves interacting with the public to formulate schemes for women’s security, road safety, and so on.

The second principle is that making a watertight case that results in a conviction is more important than media attention or medals.


Also read: How Aftab Poonawalla took TV cameras away from Modi


‘Three golden fragments’

Arresting a suspect is just the beginning of police work, according to Singh. Making a solid case is what’s most important.

“There are three golden fragments — accused, victim, and scene of crime. If the probe is watertight on all these three things, then the case is watertight, and prosecution will be easy. The prosecution will be able to draw a clean line connecting all three things,” he says.

When asked about the probe into the murder and dismemberment of Shraddha Walkar, the subject of frenzied news coverage for weeks, Singh says he hasn’t spoken to anyone in the investigating team and only knows “what has been reported in the media”.

He does, however, hint that to get the harshest penalty for suspect Aftab Poonawalla, conclusive findings about his “mindset” will have to be presented.

“I have read reports of Shraddha filing a police complaint against Aftab Poonawalla in 2020, where she mentioned that he had threatened to kill and cut her up. Here the prosecution has to prove that [Poonawalla’s] mindset travelled from 2020 to 2022 without any mental break,” the former ACP says. “A police officer knows from the beginning what the end result will be in an investigation. For someone to be awarded the death sentence or even life imprisonment in a murder case, it has to be categorised as the rarest of rare cases.

On Bunty Chor caper

Police work is serious business, but moments of hilarity can ensue here too. Singh says once such episode was the drama around the 2002 arrest of Devinder Singh, alias Bunty Chor.

Singh laughs as he recalls going in to arrest Bunty from an apartment in a posh Mayur Vihar society.

“The room had photo frames with images of people who he had robbed. There were golf kits, TVs, paintings, vases, and whatnot,” Singh says.

But that wasn’t the most unusual part of the arrest. “When we stood outside his door and he realised he was caught now, he did the most bizarre thing. He called the emergency number and told the local police that some people had come to kidnap him. It was a spectacle. He told them that he was a businessman. It took us a while to make them understand that he was a wanted thief,” Singh says.

‘I can’t erase that gaze’

A few regrets from his career still keep Singh awake some nights, he says.

One was when a woman informer was murdered by her gangster husband. “There is this look that her family members gave me. I can’t erase that gaze,” he says.

Even now, the ex-ACP keeps a diary where he keeps track of developments in cases that could not be solved during his time in the police.

“There have been two cases that I couldn’t solve. One was the Shobhit murder case and the other was the Siri Fort rape of a Swiss lady,” Singh says.

The Delhi Police’s Crime Branch unit had in 2018 filed a closure report in the Shobhit murder case, saying that they couldn’t trace who killed him. The rapists of the Swiss diplomat have also never been identified.

In the Shobhit case, Singh places some blame on the media. “There were multiple errors since the beginning. The media overplayed its part in the case, the police were misdirected, and everything was scattered. The constant media glare just made things just worse,” he says.

The dead-end in the Siri Fort rape case, he adds, wasn’t due to lack of effort.

“Sometimes police do everything they can. In the Siri Fort rape case, we launched a massive manhunt like never before. Hundreds were questioned, but nothing really came out of it. The suspects were ultimately let off,” he says.  “These two cases really bother me a lot and I continue to go through the records to check if something was missed.”

(Edited by Asavari Singh)


Also read: Rajwinder Singh, the key suspect in 2018 murder of Australian woman, arrested in Delhi


 

 

 

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