Mumbai top cop farewell gift: jail

Tall, amiable Sharma (59, arrested a day after his retirement for his role in the Telgi stamp racket, is the tenth policeman held by the SIT, also probing the involvement of other top officers and politicians.

Although there was no official comment from the SIT, Sharma’s name figured in pay-offs by Telgi, who started as a vegetable vendor but ended up amassing crores by forging stamp paper.Maharashtra’s normally garrulous politicians quickly made themselves unavailable. Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal—who appointed Sharma as commissioner over the claims of three others—and Chief Minister Sushilkumar Shinde repeatedly dodged reporters. When Shinde was finally cornered at a Catering College in Dadar, he said: ‘‘I am sure the arrest of senior IPS officials like Sharma will not have an adverse impact on the morale of the police force.’’ Bhujbal and Shinde got to know of Sharma’s arrest only 30 minutes after he was detained by the SIT, led by former DGP S S Puri.

Sharma is the second IPS officer arrested under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). IGP Sridhar Vagal was the first IPS officer to be swept into the SIT net on November 7, for allegedly accepting bribes upto Rs 76 lakh from Telgi.

Sharma was Pune police commissioner when he was heading the investigation into Telgi’s multifarious, nationwide stamp-paper racket. But he got his first jolt when his Additional Commissioner, S M Mushrif, alleged that names of five wanted suspects were dropped from the chargesheet against Telgi.

The SIT had picked up vital clues from transcripts of a telephone conversation between Sharma and former Assistant Commissioner of Police, M C Mulani, now suspended.

A 2002 SIT report authored by Subodh Jaiswal, now IGP with the SIT, quoted Mushrif as saying that Mulani—who was close to Sharma—had demanded Rs 3 crore from Telgi to keep the scamster’s family out of the investigation.

Mushrif had also accused both Mulani and Sharma of failure to apply the MCOCA against Telgi.

‘‘There is no logical reason on record to explain this act,’’ Jaiswal had said in his report. It went on to say: ‘‘If the CP was in the know about the credentials of this officer (Mulani), why he let (sic) ACP Mulani to accompany him to Bangalore during the course of the investigation is inexplicable.’’ Investigations into the Telgi racket would have been supressed had it not been for the leaking of the Jaiswal report—first published in The Indian Express. The issue snowballed into a bitter public showdown between Sharma and Mushrif, with Bhujbal backing Sharma, who at the urging of the deputy chief minister even made a trip to the office of The Indian Express in January 2003 to ‘‘explain’’ his position.

Later, when Bhujbal gve a clean chit to Sharma, social activist Anna Hazare filed a writ in the Bombay High Court, which then put the SIT under the command of retired DGP S S Puri.

The Karnataka police’s Stamp-Paper Investigation Team (StampIT) had tapped Telgi’s cell phone and recorded 100 hours of conversations that the scamster had with police officers and others from jail. The tapes were handed over to the SIT after a Bombay HC order.