Police face 8th shake-up in 18 months

PTI govt struggles to erode influence of former rulers

LAHORE:

Punjab Police has gone through large-scale transfers of senior officers at least eight times since April last year.

Over a dozen officers from the rank of DSP in grade 17 to additional IG in grade 21 were replaced in each reshuffle.

During the past three days, at least 36 police officers were reshuffled within the province, the services of nine were surrendered to the federal government and six DIGs were sent to Punjab by the Establishment Division.

A few days earlier, the services of two former CCPOs, Additional IG BA Nasir and DIG Zulfiqar Hameed, were also surrendered to the Establishment Division.

On September 2, as many 28 police officers, including CCPO Lahore Zulfiqar Hameed, seven other DIGs and a number of DPOs were transferred.

Within days after the transfers and postings, CCPO Umer Shoib Sheikh and then IGP Shoib Dastar got involved in a controversy and the provincial police chief was replaced with Inam Ghani after his reservations were not addressed by the prime minister and chief minister.

Earlier, on July 3, at least 12 officers were reshuffled. Before these transfers, CPO Gujranwala Gohar Mushtaq Bhutta was transferred and DIG Rai Babar Saed was posted as CPO. Ashfaq Ahmad Khan was posted as DIG Operations Lahore after Babar Saed was transferred. DIG Investigations Lahore Inam Waheed was also transferred. Days before this, SSP Operations Muhammad Naveed was transferred to Central Police Office and Faisal Shahzad was appointed to the post.

On April 14, six additional inspectors general, two RPOs, 13 DIGs and two SSPs were transferred and posted.

Before that, at least 83 DSPs were transferred and posted by IGP Dastagir in December last year. On November 30, 2019, four RPOs, the CCPO Lahore, DIG operations Lahore and 19 DPOs were transferred and posted a day after Dastagir was appointed.

In July, 2019, the government of Punjab surrendered the services of 10 officers to the Establishment Division. The officers whose services were surrendered included DIGs Ishaq Jahangir, Sultan Ahmad Chaudhry, Muhammad Waqas Mehmood, Imran Mehmood, Salman Sultan and Shahzad Akbar, and SSPs Nasir Mukhtar Rajpoot, Qaiser Bashir Makhdoom and Mansoor Rana.

On April 30 last year, 29 police officers were transferred and posted in the first massive reshuffle by the PTI government. Some more officers were transferred the following month.

Since PTI formed the provincial government after the general elections in July 2018, five IGPs have been changed. The IGPs appointed before the incumbent Inam Ghani included Shoaib Dastagir, Arif Nawaz Khan, Amjad Javed Saleemi, Muhammad Tahir and Dr Syed Kaleem Imam.

Every IGP tried to bring his own team and ordered transfers. However, the massive transfers started in April last year when Arif Nawaz was serving as IGP. Since then at least eight such transfers at large scale have been made.

Some controversial transfers on the complaints of influential personalities, like that of DPO Pakpattan Rizwan Gondal, were also ordered during the period.

A senior officer said influential quarters in the government circles believed that the police in the province at the at grass root level were under the influence one way or the other of PML-N. Besides, some senior officers who had been serving in the province for over a decade had made their own lobbies and they served as pressure groups for the government, he added.

The transfers at such a massive scale were meant to dismantle such groups and erode the influence of the former ruling party on Punjab Police, the officer added.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 8^th, 2020.