Gupteshwar pandey bihar police driver

On September 22, when Gupteshwar Pandey, an officer of the 1987 batch of the Indian Police Service, was granted voluntary retirement and the state home department waived the mandatory three-month notice period, it seemed a matter of time before Bihar’s director-general of police would enter politics.

Sure enough, five days later, Pandey joined the ruling JD-U (Janata Dal (United) in the presence of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar. Three days earlier, the Election Commission of India had announced a three-phase poll for Bihar, and the BJP and JD(U) were in the process of finalising seat-sharing arrangements.

However, just as everything seemed aligned in favour of Pandey’s electoral debut, the script took an unexpected turn. The two assembly seats of Buxar and Shahpur (both in his birthplace of Buxar district) that Pandey had been eyeing were allocated to the BJP.

This means Pandey, being a JD(U)