New Delhi:
Amid public anger over a series of rapes of young children in Delhi, the city's Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar is expected to lose his job soon. Sources said the government will announce his exit this week.
Earlier this month, Mr Kumar said he would not resign despite demonstrators demanding exactly that over four days of street protests, called after a five-year-old was kidnapped and raped in a room beneath where her family lived.
In one of those protests, a senior policeman was seeing slapping a young woman, provoking a seething reprimand from the Supreme Court. "Even an animal won't do what the police officers are doing every day in different parts of the country," the judges had said.
The first demands for the Delhi Police chief's removal came in December after the fatal gang-rape of a young medical student on a moving bus. Angry and large street protests paraded the capital's frustration with the anemic security for women, and the police's incompetence.
The bus that the trainee physiotherapist was raped on, allegedly by six men, was a repeat traffic offender and should not have been on the roads. Though it was a school bus with tinted windows, an illegality, it rolled through a multitude of police check points, unstopped.
What may have forced the exit of Mr Kumar from his top job, however, is a report by the Home Ministry into two major security lapses in the capital in recent weeks.
The enquiry indicted the Delhi Police for mishandling a scene of angry protestors who confronted West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as she entered the Planning Commission in Delhi. The Home Ministry's inquiry has determined that there was poor coordination between the Delhi and the West Bengal police about Ms Banerjee's movements.
A day later, the police failed to stop 150 protestors from forcing their entry into the residence of Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde.