Now a Rajasthan cadre IAS resorts to Twitter to take on IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi

IN YET another battle being fought in social networking site Twitter, a Rajasthan cadre IAS officer Sanjay Dixit has posed several uncomfortable questions to IPL commissioner Lalit Modi who is already on a sticky wicket after taking on India’s junior external affairs minister Shashi Tharoor who finally resigned from Manmohan Singh's ministry on Sunday. Already, there were I-T raids in Modi’s Mumbai office, and the government agencies may now probe credentials of IPL stakeholders.

Mr Dixit, a 1986 batch IAS officer currently serving in the cadre as irrigation secretary at the level of a joint secretary of Government of India, has asked whether there was any follow-up of Bombay High Court’s direction to BCCI to frame rules to keep people involved in drugs out, apparently taking a potshot at the cricket czar who as a student in US was convicted in charge of drugs trafficking.

The IAS officer who was once close to Mr Modi and later famously defeated him for the post of Rajasthan Cricket Association’s (RCA) president, has raised questions about the stake of Modi’s relatives in at least two IPL teams and his connections with former BJP chief minister Vasundhara Raje, which earned him the tag of Rajasthan”s “super-chief minister”.

Mr Dixit further claimed that “Lalit Modi has local modules in Rajasthan and Jaipur. Please supply their names. Hint: politicians, journalists, IT officers…”. He further Tweets, “Raids on IPL is no solution. Raid our friend’s (Modi) associates, catch people who worked for him in the past, who know all about his laundering”.

Mr Dixit, who was a marine engineer before joining IAS, is now an honorary secretary of Rajasthan Cricket Association. He was once so close to Mr Modi that they together was nick-named as “Dixit and Fix-it (Modi)” in Rajasthan, according to some local media.