Mumbai, Feb. 29: The wife of former tough cop Pradip Sawant has appealed to the President for “justice” as her husband has been “wrongly implicated in the fake stamp paper scam”.
“My husband is innocent and has been implicated because of the factionalism within the police department,” Megha Sawant said in her letter to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
Sawant is in jail after being charged with the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act for allegedly going soft on scam mastermind Abdul Karim Telgi and not taking action against his subordinate officers who were said to be on Telgi’s payroll.
The former deputy commissioner of police was largely credited with taking a tough stand against the underworld and eliminating several members of the Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem, Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan gangs.
Megha has sent copies of the letter to the home minister, the human rights commission, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and rights activist Anna Hazare.
Urging the President to “deliver justice and expose the truth”, she claims Sawant, who worked “17 hours at a stretch for days”, could in no way have been involved in the racket.
“There are no allegations of any pecuniary benefit gained by him. He was just under tremendous pressure to nab the culprits of the serial bomb blasts of 2003, as a result of which his priorities were different,” she writes.
“He had no time to look into this case (stamp scam) as he was very busy in his fight against the terrorists involved in (the August 25 and other) bomb blasts.”
“He has been charged with supervisory lapses and, particularly, for not proceeding with disciplinary action against his subordinate Crime Branch men who were allegedly hand-in-glove with Telgi. But the fact is that he was too busy with other things and the (Telgi) scam was not his priority,” writes Megha.
Two other senior officers who have been arrested in the scam are former Mumbai police commissioner Ranjit Singh Sharma and former joint commissioner Sreedhar Vagal.
Both have been charged with accepting bribes from Telgi.
