Former Mumbai Police Commissioner and retired IPS officer Sanjay Pandey has decided to join politics. He will soon join the Congress party and may contest the upcoming assembly elections from Mumbai. According to sources, the Congress is planning to field Pandey from an assembly seat that has a significant population of North Indians. Pandey will join the party on Thursday evening. Maharashtra Congress general secretary Sachin Sawant confirmed the news and said, “Sanjay Pandey has been an honest and disciplined officer who has set an example for the police force. Today he will join the party in the presence of Maharashtra in-charge Ramesh Chennithala and Mumbai Congress president Varsha Gaikwad.”
Sanjay Pandey had already announced to contest the assembly elections and had founded his political outfit ‘Rashtriya Janhit Party’. He had expressed his intention to contest from Versova assembly constituency in Mumbai. Earlier, he was also planning to contest in the recently held Lok Sabha elections but later changed his mind. At that time, he had focused on two Lok Sabha seats like Mumbai North Central and Mumbai North West.
IIT Kanpur alumnus and 1986 batch IPS officer Sanjay Pandey was appointed Mumbai Police Commissioner on 18 February 2022. During his career, Pandey was considered an honest officer, but he was also surrounded by controversies many times. His name came into the limelight when he was arrested by central agencies in June 2022 in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) phone tapping case.
Two FIRs have been registered against Pandey by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). One FIR pertains to a company called Isek Services Private Limited, which he had set up, for illegal surveillance of the phones of NSE employees. The second FIR is for violating the guidelines of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in the system audit of NSE. Pandey had to remain in jail for about five months after his arrest.
However, the Delhi High Court granted him bail in the ED money laundering case in December 2022. The court had granted bail saying that Pandey was accused of fraud, criminal breach of trust and bribery, but no concrete evidence was found for these allegations. The court also said that the allegations of bribery do not apply in this case as no one had made any allegation of demanding or taking bribe. Now Pandey is going to start his political innings with the Congress party and is preparing to contest the upcoming assembly elections.
