You have no honour, transferred CBI cop tells Nageshwar Rao in Shakespeare shayari letter

The officer who wrote to M Nageshwar Rao, left, said he derived strength from William Shakespeare's "immortal lines".

HIGHLIGHTS

• Was transferred to Delhi so my wife could take care of her ailing mother: T Rajah Balaji
• Your order transferring me to Ghaziabad was illegal: Balaji to M Nageshwar Rao
• Never too late in life to become a good man again, Balaji tells Nageshwar Rao

You know better than me that you are not a man of any honour," T Rajah Balaji wrote to M Nageshwar Rao this month, even as he asked the Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) interim director to review his transfer from Delhi to Ghaziabad.

Rajah Balaji, who was transferred from the Anti-Corruption Branch of the CBI in New Delhi, said he was posted in the capital based on a request he made in June last year.

He did so, he said, to help his wife care for her mother -- a cancer patient at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

The January 22 order transferring him to Ghaziabad -- "issued under the cover of darkness" -- was illegal, did not offer reasons, and is reversible, he said.

He mentioned that he'd complained about Nageshwar Rao's "misconduct" in 2017, and now, the top cop had abused his position to service his "personal sleepless malice and prejudice against me at the expense of institutional and public interests".

Before ending, T Rajah Balaji quoted lines from William Shakespeare's play Henry V.

"I derive strength," he wrote, "from these immortal lines from Shakespeare: 'There is some soul of goodness in things evil/Would men observingly distill it out."

After the Bard, came another barb.

"I readily admit [I] do not have the intelligence to 'distill' good out of you. But I request you to search your heart and recall this fact: you bear, you think you bear, an animosity to e, not to an ailing old woman," Rajah Balaji said.

"I request you on purely humanitarian grounds in the hope that you can truly make a start to redeem your humanity. It is never too late in life to become a good man again."

The CBI director's post has been lying vacant since January 10 after the unceremonious exit of former chief Alok Verma, who was engaged in a bitter fight with Gujarat-cadre IPS officer Rakesh Asthana over corruption charges.

M Nageshwar Rao has been the interim CBI chief since Verma's ouster.

Here's T Rajah Balaji's letter.

Inputs from Munish Pandey
SOURCE