Agency fails to complete grilling of MP Srinjoy Bose, others; ex-DGP says won't name CM even if pressured
Dramatic developments marked the Saradha probe on Thursday with hundreds of Trinamool women workers, led by State law Minister Chandrima Bhattacharya surrounding the CBI office and forcing the agency sleuths to cancel the grilling of TMC MP Srinjoy Bose and party leader Samir Chakrabarty who were summoned for the second time for interrogation.
The TMC women’s wing was protesting against alleged politicising of the probe and conducting it with the intention of political vendetta.
“This indefinite dharna will continue till the CBI does not stop its nefarious ways of investigation,” she said, adding the probe was being carried out by the BJP and the Modi Government through the CBI “to turn the attention of the people from the core area of the scam to somewhere else so that they can extract political dividends.”
Apparently unconcerned about the contempt (of court) such obstructions might attract when a probe was being conducted under the Supreme Court’s order, Bhattacharya, herself a lawyer of repute in Calcutta High Court, said, “We will not let this kind of dirty probe to continue.”
“The jumpy reaction of the Trinamool might encourage the CBI and the political Opposition because so far they have arrested no big leader of the Trinamool Congress,” Congress leader and High Court advocate Arunabha Ghosh said, adding “when a State Minister obstructs investigation ordered by the apex court then it definitely makes a fit case of Article 356.”
The day also saw arrested Trinamool vice-president and former DGP Rajat Majumdar literally daring the CBI sleuths inside the court to extract statements against Mamata Banerjee or Mukul Roy in the scam.
A strikingly belligerent Majumdar who complained of chest pain soon after his arrest on September 9 was released from hospital as doctors found no medical condition the next day. He told his captors in front of the judge on Thursday, that no length of CBI custody would be able to make him depose against top Trinamool leadership.
Even as the CBI advocate sought seven-day custody, he yelled, “let alone seven days, even 70-day custody cannot not make me speak what you want me to. You cannot beat me into confessing. I will not tell you that I acted as a courier to transfer money from Sudipto Sen to Mamata Banerjee or for that Mukul Roy during the elections.”
He went on to add, “This is a political arrest and I am being used by the CBI to get to the Chief Minister and other top leaders which I will never allow to happen.”
The Alipore Court gave him a five days’ CBI custody. He is accused of conspiracy, suppressing facts and siphoning off crores of rupees from Saradha as also helping Sen flee Kolkata after his chit fund business bombed in April 2013.