Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other
– Oscar Ameringer
The entire incident in Bengal on the evening of 3rd February reeks of conspiracy. CBI comes to talk to police commissioner on the orders of the court. They are first stalled and later arrested. Mamata Banerjee, who wasn’t even involved in the interrogation, coming to the residence of the police commissioner trying to stall CBI from entering into the house. By the way that never happens. She is chief minister for God’s sake.
Then they arrest CBI guys citing they don’t have proper documents and search warrant. Well, Police people, the badge called CBI and the court order are enough for them to ask anyone for interrogation. More than that, they are not there to arrest the commissioner rather search his premises (as far as I have read) and interrogate him. After knowing that CBI is not going to stop, Banerjee sits on Dharna because that’s what Kejriwal has made everyone think is the solution to every problem.
I don’t understand why is she crying so much. It was a general interrogation. How was it undemocratic and unconstitutional? And how is it related to her if she hasn’t done anything wrong. They weren’t even there for her.
Government officers are under the oath of government and their job is to help the government and maintain law and order. Sitting on Dharna is not their job and if they are sitting on Dharna with politicians, then there has to be something in their closets which they are trying very hard to protect.
As far as the situation appears the case is much deeper than we think. If it opens up, a can of worms will be opened and several high profile people will come under its effect.
Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, Tejasvi Yadav and many more who have lost hopes of winning elections in the future because of Modi wave, have extended their support to Mamata and her colleagues. They should. For anything that is even remotely connected to Modi, they are bound to come together. That is the only option left to them.
Yes, there is a situation. A dire and dangerous situation where every other party has joined hands to defeat the biggest political force India has ever seen. I feel so fortunate to watch this election. This is by far the most interesting event happening in the country.
This kind of situation has never arisen before and one got to see what the court’s decision will be.
I am seeing that for the first time the opposition, the commies, the leftists, the liberals have nothing to argue about and have weak counter statements. They can’t justify the hue and cry Mamta is making and can’t explain the drama if there is nothing to hide.
There doesn’t seem to be any reason why CBI inquiry should be stopped and on top of it, the quick dharna to blackmail the court, the constitution and the democracy raise many questions.
The recent brand tarnishing of Kejriwal has taken away the trust which Dharnas have in the minds of people once. No one is turning up for Anna’s Dharna who has again shown his face after five years at the appropriate time of Elections to get his piece of cake. It’s pity that his dream to become next Gandhi is finally destroyed. Thanks to Kejriwal the people who were neutral earlier but later supported Kejriwal turned towards Modi when their trust was broken by Kejriwal. In Modi, they found a saviour of this country, not that this country needed to be saved, but this country needed a good leader. A leader they can trust and who is ready to work hard. The results and effects can be easily seen everywhere around us.
The Saradha chit funds scam started way back in 2006 and the company Saradha groups who was the mastermind behind it collapsed in 2013. It was a Ponzi scheme but till the time it was found out it was too late. Saradha Group enticed them with higher returns and they got fooled by it. It kept growing because people didn’t have bank accounts and they wanted a place where they can keep their money for future use. This is one reason why Modi Government used demonetization as a means to force poor people to open bank accounts, apart from curbing black money.
The farmers who were saving money for the seeds, the clerk who was saving money for his son’s education and a street vendor who was saving money for his daughter’s marriage all got duped of their hard-earned money by people who put their interest above the country. The man named Sudipto Sen and her receptionist, Debjani Mukherjee who soon became the company’s Executive Director, planned the entire scam so that they can fill their banks with billions of rupees from people who worked day and night to earn it.
Thousands of people were conned in the scheme and when Centre interfered, Mamta Banerjee made a panel to probe the inquiry into the matter which was administered by the commissioner of Police Rajeev Kumar. It was made I guess to pacify the court that actions are taken when all it did was stall the investigation as the panel never produced any shreds of evidence. Rajeev Kumar who is the man in the question right now and is known to be absconding for last three days hadn’t attended the meeting with Election Commission officers to plan the arrangements for future elections and has been unresponsive despite several summons from the court for quite some time.
For more than half a decade SEBI, CBI, politicians, depositors have warned the Bengal government about Sudipto Sen, the infamous owner of Saradha Group but brilliant as he was, he had most politicians in his pocket. He knew this time might come. He also knew that if he had politicians involved in his scam, then they would do anything to save him as he could be linked directly to them. The Provident Fund Scam of Ghaziabad was masterminded in the same way by Ashutosh Asthana. He bribed judges so that they would save him on the rainy day.
Saradha Group was the same Company that bought Mamata Banerjee’s paintings for nearly 2 crore rupees. Many MPs like Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose who held important positions in the company were drawing salaries of about 16 lakhs to 20 lakhs per month from the company. The roots of this company were so strong that they had opened their office abroad and when SEBI tried to inquire about their income which was enormous, they forged more than 200 companies and shared the asset in different companies to justify their income.
They had TV channels of their own. They had celebrities to endorse their company and its schemes. Mithun Chakravarthy was one of them. Imagine the kind of money they were using to promote their company. Mamta Banerjee was one person who made it mandatory for all the public library in Bengal to buy Saradha Newspapers.
There was barter trade going on between the company and the Bengal government. When CBI got involved in May 2014, after the Modi government came, Sudipto’s head came under scrutiny and he found there might not be any escape for him so he wrote a letter to CBI citing the name and connections he has in the government and also that he was forced to make some loss-making investments by MPs like Kunal Ghosh. That is when the investigation took a different turn. Sudipto fled away with Debjani after posting the letter and was absconded for a brief period to time during which more layers of the scam were unearthed. He was later arrested from Kashmir.
Mamta Banerjee like most politicians in the country lives inside her head. She thinks in terms of how to manipulate people and how to manipulate the government rather than working for people which would have been an easy solution. Then she curses Modi for everything but does not have anything to counter Modi in return. She is even using the nationalism pride to save herself and the people. She is making it a matter for the country when it is clearly her personal motives who are in danger here.
Modi was always available to CBI when he was under Probe in the 2002 riots. As a chief minister, he was grilled for more than 9 hours once and no one raised an eyelid then. Later he was proved innocent by the court. I didn’t find him complaining then. That was a democratic and constitutional act on his part. This one, however, is not.
Our country is highly democratic and it is the biggest democracy in the world and if someone says otherwise, he is just trying to protect himself in the guise of showing that this country is going downhill.
If CBI doesn’t raid then they say it doesn’t do anything but when it does it is linked back to Modi.
I think the opposition thinks too high of Modi to think something like that. They like to believe that he runs CBI, Supreme court and every other government organization. If he did, there would have been more arrests in the last four years than there has been till now and more autocratic rule. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t have been possible for the Bengal chief minister to do what she is doing right now.
There is no doubt in the minds of people that this entire act is a big drama to gain public sympathy and save themselves from the clutches of law.
No matter what happens in the days to come, I am assured of one thing – the world is now seeing the true face of Bengal and what she has done to it. This will make her the centre of politics for a while and bring her in news for some time but it won’t help. It is not a very great political move. If Chanakya and Machiavelli were alive today, they would be heavily criticizing her moves.
According to them, the best course of action for her would be to burn the evidence and stall the proceedings till elections rather she saw an opportunity here to make it a country level news and use it for political gain, but – She chose the wrong topic and wrong time.