Poison Dart From A Sting

The  hearing in Calcutta High Court on May 19 regarding the arrests of West Bengal ministers Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, MLA Madan Mitra and former minister Sovan Chatterjee by the CBI, in connection with the Narada sting operation that had allegedly exposed a cash-for-favours scam in 2014, remained inconclusive. The high court had earlier stayed the bail granted to the accused by a special CBI court. All four were ministers in CM Mamata Banerjee’s first cabinet. The CBI has also filed a transfer petition to move the matter out of West Bengal, and made Mamata, Bengal law minister Moloy Ghatak and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee party to the case. The TMC has accused the central agency of playing the role of “caged parrots” serving their “political masters in the Union cabinet”. Meanwhile, the Calcutta police have filed a case against CBI personnel under the Disaster Management Act for violating pandemic-related restrictions during the arrests.

Following the arrests on May 17, Mamata rushed to the central agency’s Calcutta office and told the officers that what they did was illegal. She also claimed that the governor’s approval to the CBI for proceeding against the accused was illegal. “The high court had asked the CBI if they sought the speaker’s approval,” Bengal assembly speaker Biman Banerjee tells Outlook. “We told the court we received no application from the CBI. The governor’s approval, when the speaker was still in his chair, is unethical and legally untenable.” However, according to Rajya Sabha MP Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya of the CPI(M), who is also a lawyer, there was nothing wrong in the approval as it was given when the new government was yet to be formed. “The accused and the state government had earlier approached the Supreme Court against a CBI investigation, but failed to get an order in their favour,” he adds.

Two other persons accused in the scam are Suvendu Adhikari, the newly elected leader of the Opposition in Bengal, and BJP national vice president Mukul Roy. Both Adhikari and Roy were TMC MPs at the time of the scam—Adhikari in the Lok Sabha and Roy in the Rajya Sabha. The CBI, however, did not get sanction from both Houses to act against them. Notably, the BJP’s official YouTube channel had removed the video of the sting operation soon after Adhikari joined the BJP last December.

“The CBI has taken the right step and the Lok Sabha speaker should now grant sanction to the agency without delay so that all the accused can be brought to justice,” says Bikash Bhattacharya. His party, the CPI(M), had condemned the arrests on May 17 as the Centre’s ploy to divert public attention from the pandemic. CPI-ML (Liberation) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, too, criticised the Centre’s role. “Reeling under the Covid second wave, India is asking for vaccines, oxygen and care for the living and dignity for the dead. For the Modi government, this is the time for its politics of vendetta and persecution,” he wrote. Lok Sabha MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who heads the Congress in Bengal, questions the timing of the arrests. “It could have been done earlier or a few days later, but why during the pandemic?” he asks.