Bedi: What next?

New Delhi, Nov. 26: Kiran Bedi has applied for voluntary retirement, months after she was superseded by a junior in the race for the Delhi police commissioner’s post.

The move comes weeks after the country’s first woman IPS officer took over as director of the bureau of police reforms and development.

Bedi told The Telegraph that the decision to retire had been “brewing” in her mind for a while. The last straw, however, was when she was sidelined for the Delhi police chief’s chair.

“It could have been the trigger,” she said, when asked if the Centre’s decision prompted her to seek retirement.

Bedi had kicked up a controversy by accusing the Centre of bias in picking S. Dadwal as the Delhi police commissioner in July. Within minutes of the official announcement, she had put in an application for three months’ “long leave”.

Her statement had invited scorn from fellow officers who accused her of violating the uniformed officers’ code on speaking out in public.

According to sources in the home ministry, her application was “in process”, and in all likelihood would be accepted.

Bedi said though the notice period was of three months, the government could accept it in a day.

Asked what she would do next, the officer turned philosophical. “Raise one’s own challenges by leaving behind the status quo,” she said.

Bedi, who won the Magsaysay award in 1994 for her work in Tihar jail, said she was not planning to enter politics but wanted to finish writing a book.

Many in the home ministry fear the book may spill skeletons in the department’s closet.

She would also devote time to social work, Bedi said.

The IPS officer has set up two voluntary organisations — Navjyoti, in 1988, and India Vision Foundation, in 1994 — which provide primary education to poor children and organise adult literacy programmes for women.

The organisations also provide vocational training and counselling in slums, rural areas and prisons, apart from treatment for drug addiction.

Bedi has been an Asian tennis champion, holds a law degree, has a doctorate in drug abuse and domestic violence and is the author and subject of various books and films.

She has a website in her name, and has shared the dais with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen during a discussion on “welfare policing”.