I’m in no rush to join politics: Ex-IAS officer

New Delhi: Former Delhi principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, who has alleged that the CBI wanted him to implicate chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in a graft case, on Saturday said he is in no rush to join politics.

Mr Kumar was suspended after being arrested and chargesheeted by the CBI in a corruption case. He recently sought voluntary retirement from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).

The former Delhi government bureaucrat told PTI that he will take a call within next three months on whether to join politics. Asked about which party he would pick, Mr Kumar said, “This question will come when I am clear about which of the option I am to exercise.”

He also accused the Centre of tarnishing the image of probe agency and wondered why no FIR has been registered in the suicide of former director general in the corporate affairs ministry B.K. Bansal his family.

“As a system we did not have the courage to register an FIR (in the Bansal case). If that is the system then a lot of things are very wrong, especially when the same system can register FIR based on the complaint of Paytm that five people have cheated it,” he said.

Mr Kumar is an IAS officer of 1989 batch and an alumni of IIT-Kharagpur. He was the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration for 2006-07.

The former bureaucrat held several key positions in the previous Sheila Dikshit government. He was charged by the CBI of corruption and criminal conspiracy for favouring a private IT company in awarding government contracts worth `9.5 crore during Ms Dikshit’s tenure.

Mr Kumar said joining politics was among the options he was “weighing”, apart from NGOs and private companies of “public spirit”.