In its appeal before the Calcutta High Court to transfer the Narada case out of Bengal, the CBI has made Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee a party to it.
After the CBI arrested the four accused, the Chief Minister went to CBI office to stage dharna against the arrests. Similarly, the state Law Minister Malay Ghatak and TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee have also been made parties in the case. The CBI has accused them and the Chief Minister of forcefully entering its premises and intimidating its officers
Meanwhile, the high court today heard the bail petition and the appeal to transfer the case together. The hearing will continue tomorrow, and all the four accused of accepting bribe for favour in the infamous Narada case will stay in judicial custody tonight. Among the four, Subrata Mukherjee and Firhad Hakim are ministers in the present state cabinet.
The other two, Madan Mitra and Shovan Chattopadhyay, were ministers when the Narada sting operation took place. While Madan Mitra is presently a TMC MLA, Shovan is a former TMC MLA. He later joined the BJP and then resigned from it too. All the four, who were fit and fine before the arrest, have fallen ill within hours after their arrest.
With two heavyweight ministers sent to Presidency jail, today’s hearing was attended by legal luminaries like Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Siddhath Luthra and Tushar Mehta. While the first two stood for the accused, Tushar Mehta represented the CBI. The hearing was supposed to begin at 11 am but was postponed to 2 PM as the lawyers of the accused demanded more time.
The CBI has sought to transfer the case as they feel a fair trial of the three TMC leaders is not possible in Kolkata. They have cited several reasons for that including the presence of the chief minister and other leaders in CBI premises after the arrest and gathering of thousand outside the complex who pelted stones at the paramilitary forces. Earlier the CBI team had sent a report on these to the investigating agency’s headquarters in Delhi. The transfer case was lodged after its legal cell gave its opinion on the developments in Bengal.
The Narada case is about a sting operation performed in 2014 by Mathew Samuel. It targeted quite a few important TMC leaders and high ranking police officers. The sting showed many of them accepting bribes in exchange for providing illegal favours. The CBI has claimed that the central forensic lab has certified the video showing the accused accepting bribe as authentic.
It has also claimed that the voice samples of the four accused have matched with the voices heard in the video. Apart from Mukul Roy, all other accused were caught on tape while accepting money, and the list includes several TMC leaders and Suvendu Adhikari, the present opposition leader in the Bengal assembly.
(The author Diptendra Raychaudhuri is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. He has a wide range of experience in covering West Bengal politics and has authored).