Deputy Inspector General (State Crime Records Bureau), Rajnish Rai, a 1992 batch IPS officer, was caught cheating in the LLB exam at the Siddharth Law College in Gandhinagar in Gujarat.

I first came across the story yesterday but the officer’s name hadn’t been released at the time. My first reaction was to laugh out loud: the two people you would hope wouldn’t cheat even if you expect that they will – police officers and lawyers. And this person’s pretty much both. 

According to The Hindu, he was ‘was instrumental in the arrest of D G Vanzara and two other IPS officers in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case’. This is the case in which, as Prakash Dayal, the journalist who broke the story puts it:

“The police picked up Sohrabuddin and his wife along with a close aide Tulsi Prajapati from a bus near Sangli, Maharashtra. The inquiry by upright police officer Geeta Jauhari brought out some important facts. Police officers took three of them to a farmhouse near Ahmedabad, tortured them and then killed Sohrabuddin in the fake encounter. Then, the police officers feared that Kausar Bi would spill the beans. She might have been eliminated. No one knows what happened to her. Tulsi was let off at that time, as he was an informer of Vanzara. But when newspapers started reporting the fake encounter, expectedly, the news about Tulsi being killed also came out. We were told that he was also killed in an encounter in Banaskantha district.”

Inspector General of Police Geetha Johri spoke of ‘the collusion of [the] State government in the form of Shri Amit Shah, Minister of State for Home.” Her report to the Supreme Court said that the episode ‘makes a complete mockery of the rule of law and is perhaps an example of the involvement of [the] State government in a major crime.’

It’s a little difficult to make unqualified quips about the police because there are people like her with a great deal of integrity in the system and are probably what keep it from falling apart.

Still, a police officer cheating on a law exam was too hard to resist.

Links:
[1] hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200804271554.htm
[2] rediff.com/news/2007/apr/25spec.htm
[3] hindu.com/2007/05/05/stories/2007050510410100.htm