Office of ex-IAS hired by Congress for Guj polls burgled

The break-in came to notice yesterday when the retired IAS officer Jaswinder Singh Rana (61) found his office located near Prahlad Nagar Garden here cleaned out of the crucial data pertaining to the poll strategy, they said.

Rana entered into an agreement with Congress to run a virtual campaign employing social media for the forthcoming Assembly polls through his company Teknos.

Rana's mandate is to present "real picture" of Gujarat to the young voters. The former bureaucrat has started a programme 'Power2Gujarat' in this regard.

In his complaint lodged with the Anandnagar police, Rana said that the theft was noticed by his peon.

"When I went to the office on Monday morning I found drawers broken and twisted and copies of confidential survey reports, social media strategies and election campaign papers missing. However, personal computers and electronic equipments were not touched," he said in the FIR.

Rana told PTI that the papers stolen from his office referred to the significance of running a "clean" campaign for elections. "It seems that the person (s) wanted to steal only a particular piece of data," he added.

Rana had resigned from the service in May 2008 after he was "ignored" for promotion as Additional Chief Secretary pending departmental inquiry against him by the Narendra Modi government.

In 2002, Rana, who was then the managing director of the Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation (GSRTC), also did not heed to Modi's request to provide free of cost state transport buses for the Gaurav Yatra to campaign for Assembly polls.