The Bengal Chief Minister has termed the ED actions against Opposition leaders as ‘a dirty political game’.
With two Ministers and two MLAs behind bars for their roles in alleged scams, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been quick to lash out at the BJP-led Central government terming the actions by the Enforcement Directorate against Opposition leaders “a dirty political game”.
Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress party have launched a series of protests against these actions with the party cadre being instructed to bring out protest processions in all districts of the state to up the ante months before the Lok Sabha polls in which corruption will be the central theme.
Partha Chatterjee, the erstwhile Education Minister, has spent more than a year behind bars with allegations that he and his accomplices sold thousands of jobs of school and college teachers, depriving the genuine applicants. Images of hillocks of currency notes and gold ornaments seized from the house of Arpita Mukherjee, a «friend» of Partha Chatterjee, are fresh in the minds of the people of West Bengal.
On Friday, the Enforcement Directorate arrested Jyotipriya Mallick, the West Bengal Minister for Forest Affairs and a senior Trinamool leader who had previously held the portfolio for Food and Supplies in the State Government in connection with a multi-crore ration scam.
The ED’s latest raids leading to Mallick’ arrest early on Friday has opened another front in the Central agencies’ probes into various alleged scams involving the TMC dispensation, starting with the ones in the recruitment of school teachers and municipal employees as well as smuggling of cattle and coal.
The current round of probes actually began on 24 April, when the CBI, on the directions of Calcutta High Court, registered a case in connection with an alleged scam in recruitments in various municipalities, district primary school councils etc. According to the CBI, all contracts for the recruitment of Group C and D employees in these bodies were allegedly given to a single company, which sold the appointments to those who forked out money that was shared with Trinamool leaders.
Earlier, while probing cases of cattle smuggling, the ED had identified irregularities in the operation of rice mills. The preliminary probe led the agency into irregularities in the procurement of rice and wheat by the State Government’s Food Department, which was headed by Jyotipriya Mallick from 2011 to 2021. That brought the government’s rationing system into the purview of the Central probe agencies.
This led the ED to Bakibur Rahaman, the owner of NPG Rice Mill in North 24 Parganas. He was arrested on 18 October from his residence at Kaikhali on the eastern outskirts of Kolkata after the ED carried out search operations for three days at over a dozen locations in Nadia and North 24 Parganas, including rice and flour mills, a three-star hotel and a bar owned by Rahaman.
While Opposition parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party and the CPIM have highlighted various scams that have taken place in the past 12 years of the Mamata Banerjee government, the Centre and its investigative arms like the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation are probing at least nine scams.
“It is not possible to put a precise figure on the total quantum of money that the Trinamool Congress has looted in the past 12 years. But it definitely runs into thousands of crores,” says Sujan Chakraborty of the CPIM.
“Scams have been carried out in all sectors: education, ration, MGNREGA, PM Awas Yojana, Cooperative scam in North Bengal, coal smuggling, sand smuggling, cattle smuggling, municipal recruitment and only God knows what else,” adds Chakraborty.
Dr Anupam Hazra, the only representative from Bengal in the BJP President’s team as National Secretary who used to teach at Visva Bharati University in the Department of Social Work, told The Sunday Guardian: “If you see the leitmotif of the scams, you will see all of them are connected to each other with some key names being common. And all these names are of people who have been closely connected with Mamata Banerjee since the time she broke away from the Congress to form the Trinamool Congress.”
Md Salim, a CPIM politburo member, said: “If the BJP Government is actually serious about fighting corruption, then it must probe the organised racket that Mamata Banerjee has institutionalised in the past 12 years. The Queen Bee has to be publicly identified.”
BJP State President Sukanta Majumdar told The Sunday Guardian: “The MGNREGA and the ration scams came to the surface only when the Modi government insisted that all social sector beneficiaries be seeded and connected with their Aadhaar. That exposed the crores of false job cards and ration cards through which mind-boggling sums of Central money was siphoned off by the Trinamool leaders over the years. Remember, Mamata Banerjee was the only Chief Minister in the country who actually went all the way to the Supreme Court to try and prevent Aadhaar linking for the ration cards. Now she is shouting about the Centre depriving poor people. Let her return all the money that her party has stolen, and the Centre will release all the just dues of the people.”