The city’s detective chief, Murli Dhar, was transferred to a relatively minor posting on Wednesday, at a time when Calcutta has seen a spate of daring crimes and police have been unpopular among many.

Murli Dhar, who supervised the functioning of the detective department of Kolkata Police as additional police commissioner, was sent to Swami Vivekananda State Police Academy in Barrackpore, where his rank is inspector-general.

Pranav Kumar, from the academy, will replace Murli Dhar.

The state home department announced the transfer of six IPS officers on Wednesday evening. Senior officials declined comments on the decision.

A section of senior officers said Murli Dhar possibly took the blow for the recent murder bid on Sushanta Ghosh, the Trinamool councillor of Ward 108 of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.

Ghosh, the chairman of borough XII, was meeting acquaintances in front of his house in Kasba’s Rajdanga on Friday night when a man, who the police later identified as Yuvraj Singh, got off a scooter and tried to fire at him. But no shots were fired.

The man tried to flee on the two-wheeler but was caught by Ghosh’s acquaintances.

Three men have so far been arrested for the murder attempt, including Singh, who the police said is from Bihar, and Gulzar Khan, the alleged mastermind who is a resident of Gulshan Colony in Anandapur.

“The investigation is being carried out jointly by the detective department and the local police station. Murli Dhar has been removed possibly because questions have been raised about the police’s intelligence failure,” said a senior officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Calcutta mayor Firhad Hakim had last week said the police were not doing their job. “Enough is enough. I want to tell the police, act now. Where is the intelligence? Where is the network?” Hakim had said at a news conference at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation headquarters.

He had also raised doubts about the police’s competence to recover arms. “It is not Firhad Hakim’s job or Sushanta Ghosh’s job to stop criminals. That is the job of the police,” Hakim had said.

The criticism embarrassed the government with the Opposition equating it to a direct indictment of chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who is also the state home minister.

Senior Trinamool MP Saugata Ray slammed Kolkata Police on Monday wondering how sophisticated firearms could reach criminals in the city without the knowledge of the cops.

He told an outreach programme in his constituency (Dum Dum): “Our (Kolkata) mayor has made some observations and I also wonder how 9mm pistols can be smuggled into the city clandestinely despite supposedly strict police surveillance. This is not done.”

Not that Murli Dhar was directly responsible for all the allegations levelled against his force. But his was the head that rolled.

An IPS officer of the 2005 batch, Murli Dhar was head of the Kolkata Police team probing the rape and murder of the 31-year-old junior doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9.

The CBI has till now held that Sanjay Roy, a civic volunteer whom the city police arrested within a day of the crime, is the lone accused in the case.

The police’s intelligence gathering had come under question even then. After the RG Kar hospital rampage past midnight of August 14, then police commissioner Vineet Goyal admitted to a “failure of assessment” in anticipating the attack.

“If you say that it is a failure of assessment, yes, you can call it a failure of assessment… (that) 10,000 people will turn up here and they will vandalise the entire place,” he told a news conference at the police headquarters on August 16.

Murli Dhar has served Kolkata Police in several key positions, including as the head of the Special Task Force and the joint police commissioner in charge of the detective department.

He received the Chief Minister’s Medal for commendable service in 2020.

Among the others who were transferred on Wednesday was Swati Bhangalia, the police superintendent of the Howrah rural division. She will be the superintendent of the cyber crime department of the state police. Subimal Paul will be the police superintendent of the Howrah rural division.