Vineet Goyal, an IPS officer, was shifted to Kolkata Police Commissioner on Tuesday by the West Bengal government, meeting one of the five demands protesting physicians had made of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Goyal has rejoined the West Bengal Police as the Additional Director General (ADG) and Inspector General of the Special Task Force (STF), although Manoj Verma has taken over as the chief of police in Kolkata.
“The Police Commissioner came to me to tender his resignation… How can I accept that before Durga Puja? He knows all the roads of Kolkata and how to control the situation. After the festive season, we can think about it,” the Chief Minister stated last week during an administrative review meeting held at the state secretariat.
Vineet Goyal, an IPS officer from the 1994 class. Goyal joined the police force in August 1995 and has held a number of positions in Kolkata and the state police since then. In June 2021, when he was in charge of the STF, it shot and killed criminal Jaipal Singh Bhullar and his assistant Jaspreet Singh. They were wanted for the killings of two police officers in Punjab, which is close to Kolkata. Goyal assumed leadership on December 31 after Soumen Mitra, the Kolkata Police Commissioner, departed a few months earlier.
Verma, who succeeded Goyal, is an IPS officer from the 1998 batch who manages crises for the government. While he was Paschim Medinipur’s Superintendent of Police, he was instrumental in thwarting Maoist activity in the latter part of the 2010s. In November 2011, he spearheaded the Counter Insurgency Force that eliminated Maoist leader Koteswara Rao, also referred to as Kishen ji. He was stationed in Darjeeling by the government during the months-long strike in the Darjeeling Hills in 2017. The government appointed him the Commissioner of Barrackpore following the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, following a spike in political violence in the Barrackpore parliamentary seat region.
Due to public pressure following a fatality, the Kolkata Police Commissioner has been ousted twice in the last 17 years. At that moment, Mamata Banerjee, the head of the opposition, led the demands. After the 30-year-old computer graphics trainer Rizwanur Rahman passed away in October 2007, the TMC chief went on the streets. Then Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee moved five senior police personnel, including Prasun Mukherjee, who was then in charge of the Kolkata Police.