In a first step aimed at cleaning the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), rocked last year by the defection of its Joint Secretary Rabinder Singh, new chief P K H Tharakan has issued orders for the dismissal of a Director, indicted by an internal probe in a case of sexual harassment.
The order for dismissal of the Director follows his controversial tenure in the North-East where he was charged with serious misbehavior, including keeping a woman ‘‘under siege.’’
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Official sources confirmed that the dismissal order, the first in the agency in over a decade, has been forwarded to Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi for final approval from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who is Minister in charge of R&AW.
The Indian Express has learnt that the agency is expediting inquiries against at least three more officers—two are in the rank of Director and the third is an Under Secretary.
The Director whose dismissal has been ordered and the Under Secretary had earlier been placed under suspension. While the Director was probed for sexual harassment, the other cases under process have to do with charges of embezzlement.
One of the officers is being investigated for misappropriating huge sums of money while he was posted in Gujarat while another faces the charge of embezzling Secret Service funds.
Another officer, also in the rank of Director, is likely to face disciplinary action for actively trading in the share market which is forbidden by R&AW service rules.
Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption.
Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More
