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Manoj Ninama was the Inspector General of Police, Traffic Branch, Gandhinagar. Within 48 hours of a voluntary retirement from the police force, he traded khaki for kesari. In Gujarat, the road from bureaucratic to political power is well paved, well lit, and it appears to run in only one direction. Not only was Ninama’s resignation accepted but he also secured a ticket from Odh village in Arvalli district for the upcoming district panchayat elections in Gujarat.

On the other hand, Kannan Gopinathan, a young IAS officer of the AMUT cadre, has been fighting for more than six years for his resignation to be accepted.

Ninama’s story is not an exception. In 2018, he was convicted in a custodial torture case dating back to 2001 and sentenced to a year in jail. He allegedly beat a man in a police station to pressurise him to withdraw objections to a land deal. The conviction did not impede his career; he continued to rise, moving from the Intelligence Bureau to the State Reserve Police Force, and eventually becoming the Inspector General 2024.

In 2015, he was suspended for rigging a police sub-inspector recruitment programme, in which two women candidates allegedly entered a 1,600-metre race midway. The act was caught on CCTV, the junior officers who flagged it were reportedly pressured into silence. What followed was a cosmetic inquiry – neither surprising nor unexpected in Gujarat. He was reinstated and promoted.

His last high-profile assignment, heading the special investigation team into the Harni Lake tragedy where 14 people, mostly children on a school picnic, died. The case led to the arrests of the contractor’s partners but left the chain of official negligence within the BJP-run VMC and state government entirely unexamined. Months after that probe, in April 2024, Ninama was promoted to the IGP post.

While he retired the uniform eventually, the alignment only got clearer. His ceremonial induction into the Bharatiya Janata Party........

© The Wire