West Bengal’s politics are in a state of flux. An Enforcement Directorate unit made its way to Abhishek Banerjee’s place in the city to hand over some paperwork in a probe into an alleged recruitment fraud, but they were not let in. All this while the Trinamool is dealing with one of the most open rebellions it has seen in a long time.
What happened at Kalighat
According to the ED, their four-man team showed up at the Patuapara house in Kalighat not long after Abhishek had made his way to the Chief Minister’s home down the road. They put in more than 15 minutes and were told no, we can’t come in.
They were quick to make clear there was no raid on the cards. The whole point of the visit was to put the summons in the hands of the TMC’s national general secretary as part of their look into the money laundering side of the recruitment matter.
Political stakes inside TMC
You could call it a power play. In a big turn of events, the TMC has made the expelled Ritabrata Banerjee its new Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, a direct challenge to the party’s first pick, Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay.
Ritabrata put in a letter with Speaker Rathindranath Bose earlier on, saying he had 58 MLAs in his corner and was against the leadership’s decision. His lot put him up for LoP and wanted some good posts in the Assembly for their people. The Speaker took the letter, and in it, Mamata Banerjee is still very much the leader of the pack.
It is all about the numbers. With 58 in the bag, the breakaway group is making a show of having the two-thirds you need under the anti-defection law, which means a real split in the TMC is on the table.
Then the party comes out and says every committee and frontal in the state is being called off. They put it down to a full-scale reorganisation, with some soul-searching and a review of how things are done before they put it back together.
The case and past actions
The ED is zeroing in on the primary teachers’ recruitment. They say they are following up on a CBI FIR, put in on the Calcutta High Court’s behest, under the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act.
There is more than one file on the table when it comes to hiring for primary, SSC and Group C and D. Partha Chatterjee, the ex-education minister, was cuffed in July 2022 over the primary teacher case. He has been given conditional bail by the Supreme Court in 2025 and says he is innocent of it all.
When the ED went through Chatterjee’s properties, they came up with some Rs 47.4 crores. They have also made seven arrests, Chatterjee and Arpita Mukherjee among them, and on August 6 last year they put in a complaint against Chandranath Sinha in the Special Court (PMLA) in Kolkata.
The money talks. Six provisional orders have been put in place so far in this case for about Rs 95 crore. Across the board in these recruitment matters, the Kolkata unit of the ED has attached roughly Rs 641 crore.
What comes next
The PMLA summons was put in front of Abhishek Banerjee for a date with the agency in its zonal office on June 15. And to be clear, the officials said, there was no searching of his home on Wednesday.
Here is what you will see as the story and the politics develop:
– A run-in with the ED at the door in Kolkata
– A PMLA summons for the 15th
– Ritabrata Banerjee as the new LoP
– TMC puts an end to its committees
Will the law firm up the hard line in the TMC? You have to wonder. With a new face in the Opposition and a retooling of the party, the ED’s move has made a crisis of discipline even more pressing.
For the running of the state, it is a matter of fact. These cases have a way of reverberating through the schools and the administration. Now the legal side is up against a fickle Assembly. What happens from here will set the tone for the rest of the season in Bengal.
