In a bizarre yet plausible turn of events, a sitting chief minister personally went all the way to intervene into an official investigation of the Enforcement Directorate. This chief minister is none other than the TMC Supremo, Mamata Banerjee.
Amidst ongoing ED raids at I-PAC Chief Pratik Jain’s residence in Kolkata, the West Bengal Chief Minister rushed to the spot herself, and soon, high-voltage drama ensued. Banerjee, accusing the ED of ‘collecting’ party documents, and getting hold of the party’s strategy, hard-disks, the candidates’ list, and the ‘party plan’, asked whether it was the agency’s duty to do so, and in yet another showcase of unparliamentary behaviour, she called the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, a ‘nasty, naughty’ home minister.
‘The nasty, naughty home minister who cannot protect the country is taking away all my party documents’, alleged Banerjee, speaking using a microphone. ‘If I raid the BJP party office, what will be the result?’ she further asked.
She further accused the BJP of ‘deleting’ names of people from West Bengal through the SIR procedure, and holding a folder in her hands, which she took from the I-PAC Chief, Pratik Jain, who is also the TMC IT Cell Chief, said that ‘they have already attacked my IT office, I am going there also.’
I-PAC or the Indian Political Action Committee, is a political consultancy firm co-founded by Jain, the TMC IT Cell Chief. This firm has come under the ED’s probe radar in a money laundering case. While the ED raids were going on at the IPAC office and Jain’s residence, Mamata Banerjee hastily reached the spots and quickly took in her possession, some files, which she claimed to be ‘important party documents’.
Apart from the IPAC office and Jain’s residence, eight other locations were raided, beginning at 7 AM on Thursday, with central paramilitary forces present on the spots. The raids were conducted in relation with a fake government job scam wherein it is alleged that an organized gang scams people by offering fake government jobs.
It is noteworthy how while calling the union home minister ‘naughty’, and labelling the ED raids as ‘politically motivated’, CM Mamata Banerjee achieved the unusual feat of rushing to ground zero personally, despite being the sitting chief minister of the state of West Bengal.
At this point, the question that is repeatedly being asked in popular political discourse is why a chief minister herself would go to locations being raided under a legal probe, and rather than ensuring the smooth completion of the investigation through the right co-operation, disrupt the ongoing probe and along with the state police, take away potential evidence right from the site of concern.
The move made by CM Banerjee was not only bizarre, but also illegal. Therefore, the Enforcement Directorate, wasting no time, moved the Bengal High Court, filing a plea against this illegal interference in the due legal procedure of the agency.
What actually was ‘naughty’ was the TMC Chief’s personal interference into the legal investigation, rather than simply letting law take its own course.
