Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has been carrying out a major overhauling measure by appointing notable bureaucrats and IPS officers to help him drive his administration at all corridors amid the testing times brought up the pandemic. Stalin has sworn in as the Chief Minister last Friday and days after appointing V Irai Anbu as the Chief Secretary and picking his principal secretaries, Stalin has been appointing the IPS officers for the top posts of the state law enforcement agency. 

On Monday, Stalin has cleared the appointments to key posts in the Tamil Nadu police. The appointments include the transfer of Shakeel Akhter to the post of head of the Crime CID, which is the main investigation wing of the Tamil Nadu police. Akhter had headed a special team that killed Al Umma activist Imam Ali and his aides in 2002. Akhter was a recipient of the President's Police Medal and he has held various key posts in the Tamil Nadu police. 

Another key appointment of MK Stalin is picking Special DGP P Kandaswamy IPS as the head of the Directorate of Vigilance & Anti-Corruption. Kandaswamy's appointment has become crucial in Stalin's overhaul drive as the veteran IPS Officer is popularly known for arresting current Union Home Minister Amit Shah, a decade ago. Kandaswamy was with CBI and he was head of the team that had arrested Amit Shah in 2010 in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. 

Amit Shah was the Home Minister of Gujarat when Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife were abducted and encountered in 2005. The then ruling Congress government had set up a CBI team headed by Kandaswamy and Amit Shah was arrested by the team in July 2010 over allegations he was involved in the case. Shah got bail later that year and he was discharged by a CBI court in the case of 2014, after he became the BJP's National President. 

During the time of CBI's probe, the BJP and Amit Shah had alleged that the CBI was being used by the then ruling Congress government to target Narendra Modi, who was the then Chief Minister of Gujarat. In June 2012, Kandaswamy was repatriated to his home cadre and he was also a part of a CBI team that probed Rs 375 crore SNC Lavalin case, which involved irregularities in a contract to the Canadian company for modernizing hydro-electric power plants in Kerala. 

According to reports, current Chief Minister of Kerala Pinarayi Vijayan was one of the accused in the case, which related to his tenure as the Electricity Minister of Kerala in 1996-97. Kandaswamy has now been appointed as the head of Tamil Nadu's Directorate of Vigilance & Anti Corruption. The reports say that MK Stalin has been working towards fulfilling his promises in the polls and with the view of initiating legal actions against the ADMK Ministers who were accused of corruption in the last ten years, Stalin has appointed Kandswamy to the anti-corruption unit.