Ajay Umat | TNN 

Ahmedabad: The IIT-Kanpur Alumni Association has decided to confer on Gujarat IPS officer Rahul Sharma the prestigious Satyendra Dubey Memorial Award. The award is to be presented on March 3 at Kanpur but Sharma has not made up his mind yet on whether to attend the function.

Best-known whistleblower Satyendra Dubey (1973-2003) was a project director at the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). He was murdered in Gaya, Bihar after fighting corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral highway construction project. Like Dubey, Sharma is an

alumnus of IIT-Kanpur. The award is meant for IITians and had gone to Arvind Kejriwal, a graduate from IIT-Kharagpur, in the past.

But, there is a big catch here. Clause 12 of All India Service Rules states that if an officer gets an award, he/she has to seek permission of the government before accepting it. The chances of the government granting permission to Sharma to attend the event in Kanpur are nil.

Sharma has been charged-sheeted by the Narendra Modi government for not taking permission before submitting call data records of certain persons to judicial inquiry commissions to prove their complicity in the 2002 post-Godhra riots. The records had helped nail the truth in the Naroda Patia case where former minister Maya Kodnani was among those who were convicted.

Sharma’s records include the phones of Modi’s office, politicians and police officers and, besides revealing who was talking to whom, it shows their movements during the peak hours of rioting on February 28, 2002.

A 1992-batch IPS officer, Sharma is also being recognised as a saviour of 200 children in a madrassa in Bhavnagar which was surround- ed by a mob on

the same day. Sharma was moved out of his position as SP, western railway, on February 26 — a day before the S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express was burnt in Godhra.

He was transferred as SP Bhavnagar and he tackled the Godhra aftermath effectively. Even the Union home minister L K Advani had praised his actions in parliament. But after he submitted the CD in 2004, he has been given sideline postings and harassed by bosses with dozens of memos on the smallest of issues. Presently, he is posted as DIG, Special Reserve Police, Vadodara.