Withthe high-voltage West Bengal Assembly election round the corner, the ghost ofthe multi-crore Saradha ponzi scam is back to haunt the Mamata Banerjee-ledTrinamool Congress in the state.
TheCentral Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a fresh appealed to the SupremeCourt on Saturday seeking to quiz ex-Kolkata Police top cop Rajiv Kumar inconnection with the case. Kumar was the then police commissioner of BidhannagarCommissionerate when the multi-crore chitfund scam was busted in 2013. He alsoheaded the Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the stategovernment.
Later,the high-profile case was handed over to the federal investigation agency in2014 under the direction of the Supreme Court. A close confidant of Banerjee,Kumar was granted anticipatory bail from the Calcutta High Court on the matterwhich said that it was not an appropriate case for custodial interrogation. Inan unprecedented standoff, when a CBI team had gone to question Kumar at hisofficial residence in Kolkata, they were detained by the city police officers.
"Theinvestigation is on. The agency will do everything that is required to nail theoffenders. It's a big scam," a senior CBI official from Delhi quoted.
Meanwhile,Saradha chitfund kingpin Sudipto Sen, who is now behind bars, wrote to PrimeMinister Narendra Modi and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee pointingout the fact that leaders who allegedly took "financial advantages"from him are now switching over to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengal.The list included names of some senior political leaders of the Communist Partyof India-Marxist (CPI-M), BJP, Congress and the Trinamool Congress, the lettermentioned.
Senalso request the CBI and the state police to take necessary action againstthem. Accordingto sources, the BJP would make attempts to corner the incumbent TrinamoolCongress government in Bengal ahead of the crucial polls scheduled in 2021.Saradha scam is one of the key political issues for the saffron brigade totarget Banerjee and her party on grounds of corruptions. "The stategovernment is trying to shield Kumar from the CBI interrogation as he knowsmany things. They have left no stone unturned so that the cat doesn't come outof the bag," a state BJP leader said.
Besidesthe Saradha scam, the CBI is also carrying out probes on illegal coal miningand cattle smuggling in the state which were allegedly run in connivance with thestate administration and many ruling party leaders. The CBI's anti-corruptionbranch last month had conducted a marathon raid in as many as 30 differentlocations in West Bengal in connection with a coal-smuggling racket.
Accordingto sources, the federal investigation agency sleuths had raided the offices andhomes of Anup Majhi, alias Lala, in Asansol, Durgapur, and Raniganj in Burdwandistrict, as well as Bishnupur in Kolkata's adjoining South 24-Parganas.
Earlier,the CM had criticised the Centre for brazenly interfering with the stategovernment in its administrative functioning. Banerjee had voiced that hergovernment would never allow the brazen attempt by the Centre to control thestate machinery by proxy. "West Bengal is not going to cow down in frontof expansionist and undemocratic forces," she had said.
TheTrinamool Congress had also alleged that the BJP-led National DemocraticAlliance (NDA) government at the Centre was using various federal agencies todestabilise the government in Bengal.
Manyprominent personalities, including senior Trinamool leader Kunal Ghosh, who isnow the party's national spokesperson and ex-Rajya Sabha member, former MPSrinjoy Bose, ex-state transport and sports minister Madan Mitra, formerdirector general of police Rajat Majumdar, and top Kolkata football clubofficial Debabrata Sarkar were arrested for their alleged involvement in thechit fund scam.