NEW DELHI, Aug 2: Life was never a bed of roses for a Union Home Secretary but nobody could have felt the heat worse than the current incumbent B P Singh. Assam Chief Minister P K Mahanta has shot off three written requests two to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and one to Home Minister L K Advani asking them to ``reinstate'' Singh in Assam.An IAS officer from Assam cadre, Singh has already served over five years on deputation outside his cadre state, the maximum tenure after which the concerned state government can recall the officer.Mahanta says Singh's services are required to control the ethnic turbulence in Assam. But insiders here believe that the efforts to call Singh may have something to do with his recent utterances on the situation in Assam that invited the chief minister's ire.The trouble for Singh reportedly started when the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs held a meeting early this month. The Home Secretary, who chaired the discussion, later told a section of mediathat the law and order situation in Assam was not good and required immediate attention.Far away in Guwahati, Mahanta agreed with Singh's assessment but reasoned that this was because the state did not have enough capable officers to do the needful. Reacting to the suggestion that extremism had engulfed over 90 per cent districts in Assam, Mahanta said he wanted back all the 50 IAS officers of the Assam-Meghalaya joint cadre who have been on deputation to the Union Government and other organisations outside the state.The matter, however, did not end here. The Assam chief minister recently dispatched three letters to Vajpayee and Advani, pressing the case for recalling Singh to effectively control the law and order situation.
