RANCHI, Dec 23: It was a classic case of revenge and retribution involving two Indian Poilce Service (IPS) officers and four Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers.The case took a strange turn on December 23, when the DIG of Bihar Military Police, N C Dhoundiyal and four CBI sleuths - two Deputy Superintendents of Police, Narain Jha and Digvijay Bahadur Singh, inspector Shashi Bhushan Pandey and sub-inspector vishwanath Singh - were admitted to the Rajendra Medical College Hospital (RMCH) here, just a few hours after they surrendered before the court of Ranchi Judicial Magistrate (JM).Dhoundiyal reportedly told his driver that he was fine, when the driver visited him at the hospital. Till December 22 afternoon, Dhoundiyal was seen moving around the town in his car.In the afternoon, Dhoundiyal, along with the CBI personnel, surrendered before the Ranchi JM Ravi Shanker Sinha in a complaint case and sought bail. But the court remanded them to judicial custody.They were lodged at the Ranchi Central Jail at first. Around midnight, they were admitted to the RMCH with the concerned authorities' recommendation for their immediate hospitalisation at the RMC Hospital. "These cops cannot be treated in the jail hospital, you see," reasoned a jail doctor, who preferred to remain anonymous.The case against them dates back to 1992, when Dhoundiyal was the SP in the CBI (Ranchi branch) and Jha, Digvijay Singh, Pandey and Vishwanath Singh were his junior colleagues.On September 30, 1994 these CBI sleuths raided the house of their senior colleague, Hemchand, who was then the executive director (vigilance) in the Cental Coalfields Ltd (CCL) and arrested him on charges of accepting Rs 25,000 bribe from a "black-listed" contractor of the CCL.After Hemchand was remanded to judicial custody by the designated court of the CBI the next day, he sought bail and moved a petition in the Ranchi Bench of the Patna High Court challenging the charges of corruption slapped on him by the CBI.Hemchand, who is an IPS officer of the 1971 batch, pleaded in his petition that he was made the victim of a conspiracy hatched up by top officials and contractors of Coal India Ltd (CIL is the holding company of the CCL). He also imputed motives to 27 top government officials including the coal secretary S K Lal, CIL chairman S K Choudhary and Dhoundiyal and claimed they all had connived to malign him in public by implicating him in a false case.The HC granted bail to Hemchand on October 1 the same year. Before he was placed under suspension by the concerned authorities, the CCL's Vigilance Chief filed a case in the Ranchi JM's court alleging that Dhoundiyal and six CBI sleuths had raided his residence without a search warrant and had stolen sensitive documents related with scams in the CIL.The JM's court took cognizance of Hemchand's petition after examining the statements of the complainant and the eyewitnesses and issued summons to Dhoundiyal and the six CBI sleuths. But none of them complied with the JM's order and instead deemed it fit to approach the higher judiciary with petitions pleading to forbid the JM to proceed in the Hemchand's case.Their pleas were rejected by the Supreme Court and even the CBI headquarters refused to fight their case. The HC directed them to first surrender at the JM's court and then apply for the bail there.
