In what the Opposition promptly saw “yet another attempt to draw political brownie points”, Mamata Banerjee on Friday dashed off a strongly worded letter to the Centre for providing CRPF cover to the Income Tax officials conducting Bengal-wide raids in search of black money.
Banerjee said while it was normal for the Centre to seek police help from the State Government but by deploying Central forces for providing security to the I-T officials amounted to blatant rejection of the country’s federal structure.
The Bengal Chief Minister’s Friday grunt comes weeks after she raised a hue and cry against a routine military exercise in which Army jawans were deployed at toll plazas to take stock of public careers for the defence force’s reference in times of emergency.
She even went to the extent of painting the men in olive green with khaki brush and charged them with extorting bribe from the truck drivers at the check posts.
Apparently stung by the lack of Finance Ministry’s confidence on the State administration which perhaps led to the deployment of CRPF instead of State police, Banerjee wrote to the Home Minister, “it has come to the notice of the State Government” that Home Ministry had made available 15 CRPF personnel to provide security to the I-T officials. “The State Government objects strongly to this decision, which is blatantly unconstitutional, illegal and against all principles of cooperative federalism.”
She further wrote that “the respective executive and legislative jurisdictions of the State and Central Governments are clearly delineated in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India and ‘Public order’ and ‘Police’ are within the domain of the list II-State list,” adding “the deployment of any Central police force of theUnion to any State can only be done at the request of the State Government. The decision must immediately be revoked.”
Incidentally Banerjee’s letter was written on a day when a CRPF-backed team of I-T officials recovered `4 crore worth old notes from a trader at Brabourne Road in Kolkata’s business district.
The seizures were in addition to the `25 crore of undisclosed cash and `100 crores of unexplained money seized from a bevy of Kolkata’s jeweller fraternity.
The ED and I-T Departments were conducting raids in various parts of the State including Siliguri in North Bengal during which they recovered huge amount of black money, sources said.