Within days of CBI arresting Trinamool MP Tapas Paul for his alleged involvement in the Rose Valley chit fund case and a day before Trinamool Parliamentary Party leader Sudip Bandopadhyay was to offer himself before the Agency for quizzing in the same case Mamata Banerjee upped the anti-demonetisation rhetoric equating Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a dictator and vowed to intensify her movement against notebandi.
With inside reports doing rounds that Paul had just started spilling the beans implicating a number of his senior party men including a woman MP and her husband Banerjee resorted panic firing circuitously referring to the Prime Minister as a “dictator.”
Addressing an audience at Haldia she said “a democracy is a government of the people, for the people, by the people. But if someone comes to power by getting people’s vote and then start acting as a dictator then it has no value. The people will give a befitting reply. In India dictatorship will never be tolerated. People should not be taken for granted.”
Alleging that in the past two months industry had seen an unprecedented downslide with people having lost their jobs Banerjee drew parallels with western nations and said “even in America the economy is only 40 percent cashless and in Germany it is about 60 percent so” adding “in India those who are trying to force a complete cashless economy have no contact with the ground level. In our country 92 percent of the rural area has no banks.”
Banerjee had on Saturday attacked Modi holding him responsible for the “demonetisation deaths” even as she said “you are responsible for 112 deaths adding “Modi Babu public are not beggars of your Government.
Why are there still restrictions on cash withdrawalIJ”
Meanwhile sources in the CBI said that Sudip Bandopadhyay’s request to extend the date of his appearance before the Agency had been rejected and he had been asked to appear for interrogation on Tuesday. Bandopadhyay had earlier skipped three summons from the CBI.
The senior Trinamool leader’s expected appearance on Tuesday was likely to push up the blood-pressure levels in the Trinamool Congress ranks with reports that arrested cine star-turned-MP Tapas Paul had already started spilling the beans.
Apart from alleging that it was Rose valley chief Gautam Kundu who had got him trapped in chit fund dealings Paul is known to have told his interrogators that a woman MP of the party was a regular visitor at the chit fund office along with her husband.