The West Bengal Chief Minister drove to the CBI office as a crowd of protesting Trinamool supporters gathered outside.
After two of her ministers, Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, were arrested in the Narada bribery case, a visibly furious Mamata Banerjee arrived t the CBI office in Kolkata today. Earlier today, central forces had arrived at the homes of the ministers and two other leaders this morning and took them away, leading to a dramatic escalation of the Bengal-Centre clash just a few days after Mamata Banerjee’s resounding victory in the assembly elections.
The West Bengal Chief Minister drove to the CBI office as a crowd of protesting Trinamool supporters gathered outside.
After being taken away by central security personnel from his home just after 9 am, Firhad Hakim alleged that he was being arrested without proper sanction. Central forces also went to the homes of Trinamool MLA Madan Mitra and former Trinamool leader Sovan Chatterjee and took them to the CBI office. Chatterjee, who was earlier Kolkata’s mayor and senior minister, quit the Trinamool in 2019, joined the BJP but quit that party too this March.
Earlier this month, West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankar sanctioned CBI investigations against the four.
The Speaker of the state assembly has to sanction the prosecution of MLAs, however, in this case, the CBI did not ask the Bengal assembly Speaker for sanction but approached the Governor instead. The Governor said he had the authority to grant sanction not because the four leaders were MLAs but because they were ministers sworn in by him in 2011.
All four arrested by the CBI today were ministers the previous Mamata Banerjee government when the Narada bribery tapes were shot in 2014. Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee were sworn in by the Governor as members of the new Mamata Banerjee cabinet after she won a third straight term.
The case involves a sting operation by Narada news portal, in which many Trinamool leaders were caught accepting bribes on camera.
As an independent media platform, we do not take advertisements from governments and corporate houses. It is you, our readers, who have supported us on our journey to do honest and unbiased journalism. Please contribute, so that we can continue to do the same in future.
