JSCA President joins JVM; to contest from Ranchi

Ranchi, February 27

Former IPS officer and current JSCA president Amitabh Choudhary on Thursday joined Babulal Marandi’s JVM(P) and will contest from the Ranchi Lok Sabha seat.

Choudhary quit the civil service in July 2013 when he was an Additional Director General holding the position of Special Secretary (Home). He has since been lobbying with various political parties, mainly the BJP, to contest the general elections. With the BJP reportedly intent on retaining former four-time-MP Ram Tahal Chaudhary, who lost to Congress’ Subodh Kant Sahay in 2004 as well as 2009, Choudhary has fallen back on Plan B, the JVM.

In an interview at his offices in the Jharkhand State Cricket Association’s stadium on Wednesday, Choudhary detailed his plans for the elections.

Earlier in the day, a BCCI team had inspected the stadium’s test-worthiness. The 40,000-capacity international area is Choudhary’s main achievement as an administrator; in one particularly long sentence, he said that it was a sign of things to come: “The stadium is only an indicator. The fact that this stadium, which has been rated by experts from across the world as the best in India and one of the best in the world, could be put up in three years’ time by one private individual or one private organisation without any help from any government, any public representative, and against all odds – both man-made and natural – it only means that if the government’s resources are put in the right direction, Jharkhand should become the finest state in the country in no time. People do understand that this [stadium] is demonstrative of what can be done.”

Choudhary is likely to be among six or seven former civil servants likely to be in the fray for Jharkhand’s 14 seats this term. However, he wants to distinguish himself from most of them. “There is a distinction between somebody who had an option and has left that option to choose this. The other case is where they did not have an option – they were superannuated, had few months’ service left or there were no chance they would have reached the top of their cadre. These are different cases from where somebody who was already at the top and had a long tenure left. What have you left to come here?” he said.

Choudhary left the IPS with seven years of service left. He would have been promoted to the rank of Director General this January had he stayed on: “All I had to do was remain calm: if some government was not pleased [with me], another would have been. I would have been DGP for half the tenure, at least. There was nothing more that I could have asked for…. I find that option better than spending my time cribbing about democracy and everything that it entails.”

The IIT-Kharagpur graduate was Senior Superintendent of Police, Ranchi during 1997-’03. He considers the arrest of two gangsters, Surendra Bengali and Anil Sharma, and the subsequent death sentences they received as his biggest achievement. Consequently, he is not worried about the “outsider” tag. As someone who relishes a good scrap, he points out that labelling him as the outsider has not helped his enemies in the past: “It happened even in 2006 when the then-Home Miniser of the state [AJSU leader Sudesh Mahto] had contested against me to become the president of the JSCA. One of the things orchestrated against me was this. Did not help him.”

Choudhary says he has been campaigning for 1.5 years now, covering “every nook and cranny” of Ranchi. He claims to have been to over 200 of Ranchi’s 217 panchayats and is promising an overhaul of the city’s infrastructure: “Basically, Ranchi was only a district town before Jharkhand was created. Has it been since conceptualised as a state capital? There has been so much more burden on the infrastructure of the city. The pain of that is being felt by every citizen day in and day out. As an urban entity, Ranchi is on the brink of collapse.”

With Jharkhand fast becoming a destination for those who need a Rajya Sabha membership, it was only fair to wonder why Choudhary never attempted go to the Upper House. He chuckled, then paused. “For a person like me, the Rajya Sabha is out of the question. Because I don’t have the resources. I will say nothing more than that,” he said.

Choudhary is making extensive use of his JSCA contacts for campaigning. He is active on social media, too: “It’s supplementing my hard work, but I don’t depend entirely on it.” Yet, by the time I made the 20-minute drive back home, I had a Facebook notification inviting me to like Choudhary’s page.