With some more Trinamool Congress leaders coming under the CBI scanner in the wake of former party general secretary Sankudeb Panda allegedly making some disclosures before the agency, Mamata Banerjee has once again started speaking out against what she thinks a “planned effort by the BJP to frame some of our leaders before the Assembly elections.”
The Bengal Chief Minister has not only hit out at the Centre for letting loose CBI on the TMC but has told her partymen that she still has faith in jailed party leader and her former Cabinet colleague Madan Mitra and “firmly believe that he is not involved in the chit fund scam.”
Curiously Banerjee had a fortnight ago told a public rally that “the party is not responsible for private acts and financial embezzlements done in private capacities” and “it is for those involved in scams to hold their own briefs.”
The CM’s sudden change of stance is seen by experts as an effort to humor Mitra a former close associate who has thus far kept mum on the Saradha issue but has reportedly expressed his displeasure among confidants about the way his party has ditched him in the hour of crisis.
Mitra recently told media men when asked to comment on the way the topmost leadership was making him the scapegoat that he is “not a goat” apparently meaning thereby that he understood everything.
The CM’s statement assumes importance at a time when the CBI is planning to take Mitra out of the secured environment of Bengal, perhaps to Odisha or Assam in order to extract more information from him.
Two very recent developments is reportedly giving the top TMC leadership a creased forehead: First, the CBI’s petition to a local court seeking permission to re-interrogate jailed Saradha chief Sudipto Sen, and second the Agency’s decision to interrogate for three hours a former Trinamool leader Asif Khan who is known to have submitted some important documents to the investigators.