Siddharth Mohan Nair | The News Minute | January 15, 2015 | 12.45 PM IST
Late Wednesday night it was confirmed that the resignation of Amar Pratap Singh as the member of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) had been accepted by the government.
An IPS officer of the 1974 batch, he was formerly the Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from 2010 to 2012.
Soon after his retirement, in February 2013, he was given the post of a Member in the UPSC by the Congress-led UPA government. Singh’s resignation has come just over two years before his tenure in the UPSC was to end.
“I have resigned because of the court observation about the handling of the Amit Shah cases. As the CBI Director, I have always carried out my duties in a professional manner,” he had told the Indian Express on Wednesday.
However, this reason doesn’t come across as convincing. The special CBI court, while absolving Amit Shah in the encounters of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati, had said in December 2014 that Amit Shah’s name was included in the case for “political reasons."
It was Singh who was the Director of the CBI when the case was filed, and thus his reason is that the court’s observation made him resign.
The special CBI court is not the highest court of the land and an appeal could have been made by the CBI. An officer resigning from a constitutional office on the basis of an observation (emphasis) made by a court is hard to believe.
The actual reason, many believe, which Singh himself does not talk about, seems to be the information now in the open about his link to the controversial meat exporter Moin Qureshi.
After his tenure in the CBI ended he was under the radar of the Income Tax officials. They had found many messages passed between him and Moin Qureshi via Black Berry Meesenger. The messages indicated that there was a request made to Singh to help Moin, who himself is under the IT radar for hawala transactions.
In June 2014, Singh and few of his family members had also received summons from the IT. They had also been asked to produce details of their bank balances, credit card payments, and also of property and travel.
Not a word about this was said by Singh on Wednesday when he said that he had submitted his resignation. Only further investigation by the tax department will show what these links with Moin Qureshi actually meant.
There was a haste shown by the Congress-led UPA in appointing this Jharkhand cadre officer who is a recipient of Indian Police Medal and the President’s Police Medal as the Member of the UPSC. His tenure in the CBI ended on 30 November, 2012 and on 13 February, 2013 he was appointed in the UPSC. Should the government have made efforts to check his credibility before appointing him to a constitutional post?
“I do not know if the information as it is available today had been available when his appointment was made but the UPA was a bit lax on such issues,” former Cabinet Secretary T.S.R. Subramaniam told The News Minute.
His resignation, apart from raising doubts on the way in which appointments to such constitutional posts are made, will also raise question marks on the recruitment made by the UPSC during his two-year-long tenure.
The government has so far not commented on his resignation. It should make it clear whether it had asked Singh to resign or was it done without its asking. The process for removal of a UPSC member is same as that of the removal of a judge of the Supreme Court, and is a difficult process.
The government’s silence can prove costly if it gives an impression that the alleged links of Singh and Moin Qureshi are being set aside, and that he is being given an escape route by citing the CBI court’s adverse observation as the reason for his resignation.