Bhabani Bhawan does not usually experience this level of buzz on a Sunday. Not this past Sunday, however. The headquarters of the West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department was turned into an absolute fortress much before the break of dawn. The Rapid Action Force personnel had taken their designated positions. The streets were blocked with heavy barricades. At 11:43 am sharp, Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee entered through the main gates. This was 17 minutes before the scheduled noon appearance. He signed the attendance register and flashed his ID card at the reception before entering the room to undergo the grilling.
The meeting ended and he emerged out of the office complex at 8:20 in the evening. His nearly 8-and-a-half hour long interrogation left him visibly tired. The veteran politician also did not entertain the local press who were aggressively shouting questions behind the barricades, and drove straight to Mamata Banerjee’s Kalighat residence, instead of coming directly to his own apartment after the nearly eight-and-a-half hours in the interrogation room. This interrogation was no special Sunday activity; he was also summoned twice thrice in the span of three days over a legal battle that has only been spiralling.
Anatomy of the Signgate scandal
The state investigators are looking into a case widely termed “Signgate” by the local media. Though the nomenclature suggests it to be merely an administrative blunder on paper, the criminal aspect of it holds grave significance. On May 18th, the Trinamool Congress submitted a resolution to the West Bengal Assembly Speaker seeking the appointment of veteran politician Sobhandeb Chattopadhyay as the Leader of the Opposition. The submission contained an attendance sheet bearing the signatures of the MLAs who attended a party meeting on May 6 th.
Things took a sour turn a few days later, when two rebel TMC MLAs, Ritabrata Banerjee and Sandipan Saha, submitted a formal letter to the Speaker claiming they had never signed the said paper on the stipulated day and that their signatures on the documents have been fabricated. While inspecting the forwarded papers the CID investigators noticed that few names on the crucial attendance sheet were printed in block letters instead of actually bearing signatures.
However, Abhishek Banerjee who forwarded the aforementioned document to the speaker on 20 th May in his capacity as the general secretary of the party was immediately put in the dock. Hare Street Police lodged the FIR initially and sections 417, 418, 419, 420, 467, 468, 469, 471, 120 B of the IPC (sections of the old law as it was a non-bailable offence that was put in the severe category of the BNS after it was enacted). Later on 28 th May CID officially took over the probe and have been chasing the original resolution book for a while now.
Direct face-to-face interrogation techniques
Today’s interrogation at Bhabani Bhawan had taken a stark shift towards strategic intervention in the middle of the afternoon when the CID asked TMC MLA Kunal Ghosh to appear for questioning and come up with a statement regarding his name in the sheet. Ghosh reached the office of the CID and spoke to the press outside while eating an ice cream, saying that while his signature on the attendance sheet is “real”, he “cannot” stand surety for anyone else’s name.
After Ghosh passed through the security he was brought into the same room where Abhishek Banerjee was sitting. Detectives grilled the two politicians and cross-questioned them directly about the original resolution book that went missing and asked who physically handled it. The detectives interrogated both the men asking them to identify the people present in the room at the time signatures were taken. Investigators allegedly utilized the responses given by Kunal Ghosh in the interrogation room for the cross-examination of Banerjee simultaneously.
CID sources suggested that a lack of headway was also achieved during the nearly nine-hour long session of grilling today. The detectives continued asking him about the location of the missing resolution book that is urgently required for handwriting analysis so that it could be compared with the signatures of the petitioning MLAs and thus determine if they are fabricated or genuine, yet Banerjee allegedly continued denying that he has any clue regarding the missing documents.
Midnight Raids and Broken Locks
The CID crackdown is also happening on a broader, more intense scale. Yesterday night at nearly 3 am the Shalboni police raided a premise at Kalighat that is allegedly linked to Banerjee and tried to track his PA Sumit Roy using his mobile phone’s signal. The police kept knocking at the doors and calling for two hours continuously, but no one seemed to turn up from the house. Dis disaster management team had to be called and the locks to the premises were ultimately broken, creating utter chaos and panic in party circles as many were allegedly seen to be rushing to the same site in the morning including former CM Mamata Banerjee. However, by 8 am the police had packed up the search; Sumit Roy was not found there and no papers were seized, but the audacity of the raid that happened at the dead of the night sent a clear signal on the intensity of theprobe.
The Tightening Legal Grid
The TMC MP is at present under the minimal protection of the Calcutta High Court order that granted him a three-week interim anticipatory bail a week ago. However, the court has clearly stipulated that he has to cooperate in the investigation, and that is exactly why he was forced to present himself at Bhabani Bhawan today and also on Saturday, however his busy schedule isn’t any easier to handle since on Monday he is also being called to the CGO Complex at Salt Lake to appear before the Enforcement Directorate in relation to a much bigger school recruitment scam case, and on Tuesday he has been summoned again by the CID over a new FIR lodged at Siliguri for allegedly making criminal threatening remarks against Union Home Minister Amit Shah during an election rally recently.
Today’s was merely one long shift in a complicated chain of events as till date, the forgery charge is relying solely on the interrogation of two individuals and multi-hour questionings.
