Earlier this week, news agency ANI had released a letter of senior Karnataka police officer D. Roopa to the Namma Bengaluru Foundation in which she refused to receive an award reportedly offered by the foundation. However, the issue now took a controversial turn with the NGO claiming that the officer was never offered the award, instead she was just shortlisted along with seven officials.
Roopa had made headlines after she exposed the special treatment allegedly given to jailed AIADMK leader V.K. Sasikala in the Bengaluru prison. Roopa was the deputy inspector general (prisons) at that time.
“She was never offered this award and so there was no case of her turning it down,” the foundation said in an official statement. It also accused the officer of "relentless lobbying" when she was nominated to the award.
“Never in the long history of recognizing the heroes of our city by a jury of respected Bengalureans have we experienced this relentless lobbying for the award, then followed by this immature malicious conduct by a nominee who did not make it to the final winner,” the statement said.
Roopa is currently the Inspector General of Police (Home Guard and Civil Defence, Bengaluru).
“This person had engaged with the jury extensively and did not mention a word of these newly discovered ‘views’ at any stage of her interaction,” the NGO further said in its statement.
Earlier, in her letter to the foundation, Roopa had said that she could not accept the honour because it carried a heavy cash award and that her conscience does not permit her for this.
“Every government servant is expected to maintain neutrality and equi-distance from all quasi-political bodies and associations that have even the bare minimum political overtone," she had said in her letter in an apparent reference to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the BJP MP who founded the organisation.