The left Front raised the decibel level demanding arrest of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as Bengal Opposition leader Suryakanto Mishra on Tuesday said he had sought an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in order to discuss the Saradha case.
If granted an audience, he would demand immediate interrogation of the Chief Minister by the CBI so as to speed up the investigation process in the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam, he said.
Mishra, who on Tuesday met the media, said he had “sent a letter to the Prime Minister seeking his appointment as there is an urgent need to speed up the investigation process that would include a peremptory interrogation of the Chief Minister so that her role in the scam, that has affected several lakhs of people, is ascertained.”
The BJP Government is bound by its commitment to take the probe to its logical end Mishra said adding, “though the ED, CBI and SFIO are all central agencies there is no major headway in the investigation process as all the masterminds of the scam are still roaming free. So it will be in the fitness of things that all senior Trinamool leaders, including the Chief Minister, are grilled at the earliest without which the probe will not reach its logical end.”
His politburo colleague and CPI(M) State secretary Biman Bose said, “there is an urgent need to interrogate the Chief Minister so as to ascertain whether she held a meeting with Sudipto Sen at Dello Bungalow in Kalimpong or whether she was pre-informed about his whereabouts after he fled Kolkata in April 2013.”
The CPI(M) on Tuesday evening took out a rally led amongst others by former Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. The CPI(M) rally was organised hours after a massive procession taken out by civil society members backed by the BJP in support of good and corruption-free governance. Among those who were present in the rally were magician PC Sarkar, Bangla actors George Becker, Nimu Bhowmick and Joy Banerjee.
Meanwhile, in a related development Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee continued her tirade against the BJP and the left picking out Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar for meeting the Prime Minister.
In a statement, apparently made towards a particular section of people, Banerjee said, “the BJP and the CPI(M) are brothers. They are shameless creatures fighting together against us and taking the Congress in their company. But we will still defeat them.”
On the recent rallies staged by the BJP in Kolkata she said, “Bengal is not a lollipop that anyone can have. We will not allow outsiders to take control of Bengal.”