Four bureaucrats, including ex-IPS, in poll fray from Amritsar district

Neeraj Bagga

Amritsar, February 17

Leaving behind lucrative jobs, around four bureaucrats have jumped into the political fray this time.

A 1998-batch IPS officer, Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh, opted for premature retirement from service last year to join AAP. His resignation came immediately after the Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the probe report filed by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) in the Kotkapura firing case. Later, talking to mediapersons, he announced that he was joining politics to clean the system.

Jagmohan Singh Raju, Additional Chief Secretary of Tamil Nadu, had taken voluntary retirement from his service to contest the Assembly elections as a BJP candidate from Amritsar East. He had one-and-a-half year service left when he took the VRS. He is challenging Navjot Singh Sidhu, PCC president, and SAD candidate Bikram Singh Majithia. He said the ‘painful’ condition of Punjab propelled him to plunge in politics. He said his objective was to restore the prestige of the holy city. Jagmohan said when he left Punjab in the 80s, the state was on top of the list for various parameters of development. Sadly, at present, it was in a dismal condition, which forced him to resign and contest elections.

After unsuccessfully contesting from the Jandiala Assembly seat in 2017, Harbhajan Singh, AAP leader, is again trying his luck. He had resigned from the Excise and Taxation Department and had cracked the ambitious PCS examination to gain the plum post. He said his job was lucrative for family, but not for the society. “A family is the smallest unit of any society. If a society falls in disarray, the families will fall apart. So with the motive of correcting the vices from society, I joined the politics,” he said.

Retired ADC Jaswinder Singh Ramdas is contesting as an AAP candidate from the Attari Assembly seat. Upon his decision to join the politics, he said this was in his family. His father Subedar Ujagar Singh had been a SGPC member and also an acting president of the SGPC. “My father had been an MLA from the then Verka Assembly seat from 1997 to 2002,” he said.