Four days after his men were assaulted along with their CRPF escorts while raiding two district-level Trinamool Congress leaders in the ration distribution scam, Enforcement Directorate chief Rahul Navin flew into Kolkata late on Monday night and met his officers. According to sources present in the meeting, the ED director told his officers to “carry on with the probes into the multiple corruption investigations in the state without fear or favour”.
All ED officials of the Bengal zone, including the three who had been injured in the mob attacks, are learnt to have participated in the meeting.
The ED director was briefed about the attacks and also shown the video footage of the twin assaults.
Apart from talking up the morale of his officers, the ED chief also met the West Bengal Governor CV Ananda Bose at Raj Bhavan to apprise him about the progress of the investigations and what steps were being contemplated to ensure that investigators do not face any problems while conducting probes in West Bengal.
The meeting comes the day after CRPF Inspector-General Birendra Kumar Sharma met the Governor to brief him about the attack on his officers and the new Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that have been formulated after the attacks. Sources said that the ED chief also held a high-level meeting with the senior officials of the CRPF, CISF and BSF to discuss how to launch a coordinated, multi-pronged attack on corruption. While the Inspector-Generals of the CRPF and CISF were present, the Border Security Force was represented by its DIG (South Bengal) and the National Investigation Agency by its Superintendent. A surprise inclusion was the Principal Director (Investigation wing) Pankaj Kumar, sources added.
The investigations into the coal and cattle smuggling, the job scam in education and in municipal bodies in the State and ration distribution are in an advanced state and the officials also discussed the modalities of a multi-pronged, coordinated action on them, sources said. Reacting to the news of the multiple meetings by the Central investigative agencies, Trinamool Congress spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said: “This is all a drama being coordinated by the BJP. The list is being given by BJP leaders and the agencies are asked to raid the Trinamool leaders whose names are given.”
While these meetings were on, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, the State Agriculture Minister who holds the distinction of being the Trinamool Congress’ first MLA, courted controversy with his comments that the recent attacks on ED officers during raids in North 24-Parganas district was a result of “explosion of public grievance”.
Chattopadhyay also predicted that such attacks would take place in other parts of the country, too, where probe agencies conduct raids. “We have seen the explosion of public grievance at one place in the State… Such incidents will happen at other places in India as well in future,” he said at a programme on Tuesday. Chattopadhyay also claimed that the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG) had unearthed scams worth several hundred crores of rupees in the present BJP-led regime at the Centre, “but the party sends probe agencies to only non-BJP States”.
Rubbishing the Minister’s allegations, BJP MP Dilip Ghosh said the TMC Government must be immediately uprooted from power to save the people of West Bengal.
Left Front leader Sujan Chakraborty said that Chattopadhyay, one of the oldest party leaders, was trying to score brownie points with such statements because he wanted to curry favour with the Trinamool high command especially since there were differences within the party about a retirement age for leaders.