Not easy for Teflon Mamata to dust off corruption dirt
For the much-maligned Enforcement Directorate, the recent seizure of heaps of cash from two houses of sacked Trinamool Congress minister Partha Chatterjee’s sidekick came as its second vindication. The first was from a Supreme Court bench that could find nothing wrong in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, which gives the ED more powers than the police. Arguments that the law gave the ruling party at the Centre the power to indulge in political vendetta did not find merit before the bench. Anyway, Trinamool boss and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is no stranger to controversy.
She cultivated her USP as the most strident critic of the Centre after she attacked enforcement eagles that preyed on her party while probing the Narada, Rose Valley and Saradha scams but went easy on some who switched to the BJP. She also successfully fought off another serious charge of Trinamool functionaries demanding bribes from people at the grassroots level for access to even basic welfare schemes by introducing intra-party correctives. However, the current controversy is different.
Mamata is on the defensive because images of Chatterjee’s stash displayed in drawing rooms on loop on national television make the Trinamool look very dirty. For he was the third most powerful leader in the party. Though the Trinamool sought to distance itself by stripping Chatterjee of all posts, it is difficult to believe that he sold hundreds of teaching and other government posts under Didi’s nose without her getting a whiff. That the scam unravelled in a state hostile to the ED shows sustained agitation by the affected parties can force the judicial hand and put any popular government on the back foot. It is a different matter that in another state, a powerful minister caught in a similar cash-for-jobs scam coolly walked out of it by making out-of-court deals with litigants last year with the judicial endorsement!
The charges of corruption come at a time when the Bengal BJP is trying to resurrect itself. For Mamata, though, her Teflon image remains intact because she is seen as frugal and personally clean. But she can’t let the grass grow under her feet if she has to realise her bigger ambition of being the opposition’s prime ministerial candidate.