pollution row: Pilgrims on the way to the Amarnath shrine

Srinagar, Oct. 13: The Amarnath shrine board’s former chief executive has challenged the action against him for statements that apparently led the People’s Democratic Party to withdraw support to the Congress-led government.

IAS officer Arun Kumar has moved the Central Administrative Tribunal in Delhi against the four-month-old order that shifted him to the general administration department without giving him any assignment.

Kumar is accused of having questioned local environmentalists’ claims that Amarnath pilgrims caused pollution of forests and streams on way to the cave shrine, arguing that Muslims around the Dal Lake did the same.

Kumar had asked at the height of the Amarnath land row why “Muslim pollution (Dal Lake) was tolerable and not Hindu pollution (Amarnath pilgrims)”, stunning people and causing the PDP to apparently end support to the Ghulam Nabi Azad government.

A panel of senior IAS officers S.S. Sahani, R.K. Jerath and Basharat Ahmed Dhar is probing Kumar but it has recommended that he be shifted to the general administration department till a report is submitted. The PDP had earlier approached court for action against Kumar.

“The order is bad in the eyes of law as a senior officer in the bureaucracy can’t be made to sit without work, as held by the Supreme Court in the Chinnaswamy case,” Kumar’s lawyer A.K. Sawhney said from Jammu.

Sawhney has argued in his petition before the tribunal that the probe against Kumar violates law. “Two officers of the committee, R.K. Jerath and Basharat Ahmed Dhar, are junior to the petitioner and on this count the inquiry is void ab initio,” the petition said.

Kumar has suffered humiliation and harassment at the hands of the Azad government, Sawhney said, adding that the order against him “is based on ill-will, mala fides and is arbitrary in nature”.

“The height of humiliation is that his bungalow and staff were withdrawn as a measure of harassment. He is being made a scapegoat on personal malice,” Sawhney said.

Before the PDP pulled out in June, two of its ministers had been under fire for having gone along with the state cabinet to clear the land allotment to the shrine board, which then had governor S.K. Sinha as its chairman. Looking for a face-saver, the party had said it was walking out in protest against Kumar’s objectionable statements.