New Delhi: The Union government on Wednesday (September 27) transferred senior IPS officer Rakesh Balwal, who had been in Jammu and Kashmir since 2021, to Manipur. Balwal is from the Manipur cadre and had been serving as the Srinagar SSP.His inter-cadre deputation was supposed to last a year longer, The Times of India reported, but the Manipur government had sought his repatriation about 20 days ago.Balwal, a 2012 batch officer, had headed the National Investigation Agency team that had probed the 2019 Pulwama attack. According to The Hindu, Balwal was behind the exhaustive 13,500-page NIA charge-sheet filed before a special court in Jammu and Kashmir.“He was brought to Srinagar when the law and order situation had deteriorated in the district and there were targeted killings of non-local residents,” a Srinagar based-officer told The Print. “He started operating with teams to identify vulnerable populations and his work yielded positive results with no targeted killings [in Srinagar] since he took over in December 2021.”Manipur has witnessed severe ethnic conflict and violence since May 3. The last few days have seen an uptick in violence after the bodies of two young students were discovered. About 200 people have lost their lives in the violence.This is not the first senior IPS officer to be transferred to Manipur during the violence. In June, the government had ordered the cadre change of senior police officers Rajiv Singh from Tripura to the Manipur police and appointed him as the police chief of the state.Last month too, the state government appointed a former army colonel as the SSP in the state police, Hindustan Times reported.
