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Journalism of Courage
Fulfilling one of the five conditions that protesting doctors had laid before Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal government transferred IPS officer Vineet Goyal as Kolkata Police Commissioner on Tuesday. While Manoj Verma has replaced him as Kolkata Police chief, Goyal has returned as the head of the West Bengal Police’s Special Task Force (STF) as Additional Director General (ADG) and Inspector General.
This comes a week after Banerjee said Goyal had twice expressed his desire to resign following intense criticism of his handling of a doctor’s rape and murder at Kolkata’s R G Kar Hospital on August 9. Five days after the incident, as people hit the streets across the city in protest against the incident and to “reclaim the night”, the hospital was vandalised by a mob. Afterwards, Goyal admitted to a “failure of assessment” and clarified that initially registering a case of unnatural death did not imply a predetermined conclusion of suicide. This brought him into the crosshairs of the protesters.
Twice awarded the police medal for gallantry and a recipient of the Chief Minister’s Medal for Outstanding Service, Goyal is a 1994-batch IPS officer. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIT Kanpur, Goyal has served in various roles in Kolkata and the state police since joining the police service in August 1995. He was leading the STF when, in June 2021, it gunned down gangster Jaipal Singh Bhullar and his aide Jaspreet Singh, who were wanted for the murderers of two policemen in Punjab, near Kolkata. Months later, as Soumen Mitra retired as the Kolkata Police Commissioner, Goyal took charge on December 31.
In June, Governor C V Ananda Bose submitted a report to the Union Home Ministry alleging that Goyal and another officer were “functioning in a manner which is completely unbecoming of a public servant”. Bose highlighted various incidents, including what he alleged was the officers “promoting and encouraging concocted allegations” by a woman employee of the Raj Bhavan against him.
This is the second time in 17 years that a Kolkata Police Commissioner has been removed because of public pressure over a death. At the time, it was Opposition leader Mamata Banerjee who was at the forefront of the demands. In October 2007, the TMC chief hit the streets following the death of 30-year-old computer graphics trainer Rizwanur Rahman. Then CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee transferred five top police officers, including then Kolkata Police chief Prasun Mukherjee.
Verma, who has taken over from Goyal, is a 1998-batch IPS officer and a crisis manager for the government. He served as the Superintendent of Police of Paschim Medinipur, playing an important role in countering Maoist activities in the late 2010s. He led the Counter Insurgency Force that killed Maoist leader Koteswara Rao, known by his nom de guerre Kishen ji, in November 2011. During the months-long strike in the Darjeeling Hills in 2017, the government deployed him in Darjeeling. After the Lok Sabha elections in 2019, as political violence flared up in the Barrackpore parliamentary constituency area, the government appointed him the Commissioner of Barrackpore.
