Saradha scam: Too late for damage control

KOLKATA: No one knows it better than Trinamool mandarins that CBI’s Saradha probe is denting its credibility beyond repair. But it has no option but to launch a fierce counter-attack against the BJP-led Centre to stifle criticism by Opposition parties in the aftermath of Madan Mitra’s arrest.
In doing so, Trinamool is losing sight of a bigger enemy back home — public perception.
The Rs 2,460-crore Saradha scam may be smaller in scale than other financial frauds, but it threatens to bleed Trinamool more than others. Nearly 1.8 million people parted with their money for the lure of lucrative returns. They are hurting.
Therefore, conspiracy theories against the Centre and accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of vendetta will not cut much ice with people.
Echoing Didi, panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee alleged that Mitra’s arrest had been decided by the Centre “even before Amit Shah came to Kolkata”.
But for the grassroots Trinamool worker, who needs to echo this in his para, it is befuddling. Only a few years ago, Trinamool was championing the cause of CBI in the Nandigram and Netai probes. The change is all too sudden.
On September 7 this year, on his maiden visit to Kolkata after being made BJP national president, Amit Shah made it clear to party workers that the Saradha scam has to be the focus. Too many people were directly affected by it to be ignored, he said. “Sustained campaign by BJP since then brought the issue back to focus. The Opposition in Bengal, till then, lacked sting. Trinamool’s attack against us only reflects their worry and fear,” argued Sidharth Nath Singh, BJP national secretary.
On September 12, 2012, when Mamata pulled the plugs on the UPA-II regime, she had prevailed over a section of her reluctant party MPs by arguing that the “scam-tainted Manmohan Singh government” would be a political liability in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Mamata had gauged the mood right. But now Trinamool faces similar corruption allegations as it heads for KMC polls in 2015 and assembly election in 2016.
Instead of distancing the party from those arrested in the Saradha scam, Mamata has given each one of them (bar Kunal, perhaps) a clean chit in public.
She may have gone too far now for a face-saving U-turn. This isn’t lost on Mamata. She had snubbed Madan Mitra on several occasions after CBI indicated its intent to question him in August 2014.
She, however, gave a clean chit to Madan later. Party MP Abhishek Banerjee had said on December 1, “The party will have nothing to do with anyone found guilty in an impartial probe.”
Between April 2013, when the Saradha bubble burst, and May 9, 2014, when Supreme Court ordered a CBI probe, the state had over a year to probe allegations and make amends. It did little.
To cap it all, before his arrest in November 2013, suspended Trinamool MP Kunal Ghosh had dared party secretary-general Partha Chatterjee to form an inquiry committee to probe the party’s Saradha links. Trinamool overlooked it. “Perhaps, in hindsight, it should have been done,” rues a senior party MP.
In 2011, the people of Bengal had given Mamata Banerjee a decisive mandate, having been fed a daily dose of anti-Centre tirade for 35 years. Mamata had promised to deliver. Three years down the line, she is back to the old script of attacking the Centre — but this time on a probe mandated by Supreme Court, with television grabs beamed into every Bengal home showing her cabinet colleagues praising a Ponzi racketeer, two MPs being arrested and allegations being hurled at her door-step. Perhaps, public perception is her biggest problem now — not the Centre.