Regret posting Durga to Noida, not her suspension: Akhilesh Yadav

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has said he regretted having posted suspended IAS official Durga Shakti Nagpal to a prime district like Noida, but he defended her suspension. In an interview to Wall Street Journal, Mr. Yadav said on Wednesday that it was at the request of Durga Nagpal’s husband, also an IAS official, that she was posted in Greater Noida.

In hindsight, the chief minister said, he regretted having ceded to the demand on a purely humanitarian grounds. Husband of suspended IAS Durga Shakti Nagpal is posted in Ghaziabad. The chief minister while defending the action of his government to suspend Ms. Nagpal, said he has never interfered in the working of the official.

“I have no knowledge what she did against the mining activities in the area,” the chief minister was quoted as saying and denied any link between Ms. Nagpal’s suspension and the mining activities.

Reiterating the previously stated stand of the government that the SDM of Noida was suspended following her orders to demolish boundary wall of an under construction mosque in Kadalpur village of Greater Noida, the UP chief minister told WSJ that to write and speak about any action, one would have to understand the complexities of the state as large as Uttar Pradesh.

There have been communal flare ups in the state and under such circumstances, the government cannot be expected to sit back, he said.