“Go and surrender”, a high court judge told the counsel for Rajeev Kumar while hearing an anticipatory bail plea moved by former Calcutta police chief.

Justice Subhashish Dasgupta, the junior judge on a division bench also comprising Justice Sahidullah Munshi, said so when the lawyer said the IPS officer was being “hounded like anything” by the CBI in the Saradha probe.

Moving the petition, Kumar’s counsel Debasish Roy alleged that CBI officials have been conducting raids in various places to take his client into custody. “The CBI is hounding (Kumar) like anything,” said Roy. At this, Justice Dasgupta said “Go and surrender.”

The leave of Kumar, currently the additional director-general in charge of the state CID, will end on Wednesday.

As Kumar’s counsel continued to plead before the division bench to “urgently” hear his client’s case in detail, Justice Sahidullah Munshi — the senior judge of the bench — fixed the matter for hearing on Wednesday at 2.30pm.

Kumar’s pre-arrest bail plea was rejected on September 21 by the Alipore district and sessions court. The agency has issued multiple notices to Kumar, asking him to appear before it as a witness in the Saradha probe.

Kumar, however, has remained elusive since the Calcutta High Court, on September 13, refused to grant him further protection from arrest and rejected his plea for quashing of a CBI notice that had sought his appearance for questioning.

Kumar was part of a special investigation team set up by the Mamata Banerjee government probe the case before the Supreme Court handed the probe over to the CBI in 2014. The scam came to the fore in 2013, when Kumar was the commissioner of Bidhannagar, where the Saradha Group’s headquarters were situated.

On Monday, Kumar’s wife Sanchita Kumar had come to the high court and affirmed his petition. The vakalatnama attached to the petition bore Kumar’s signature, court sources said.