Mamata on the defensive

The ugly events unfolding in Kolkata, West Bengal’s capital, show that the BJP will not leave Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alone even after she outwitted the saffron party and won a landslide victory in the recent assembly polls. The arrest of several senior leaders of the Trinamool Congress including two ministers by the CBI in the Narada tapes case must be seen as the beginning of a new season of offensives against Banerjee by the establishment in Delhi. A question is, why else did the CBI wait for five years to proceed in the matter even when there were sufficient grounds to suspect wrong-doing?
On the BJP’s part, the party having suffered a major loss of face in the state, wants to keep the heat on Banerjee if only to keep her under control. The saffron party’s strategy to take on the CM at the political turf has failed as it had no “local” leader to hold aloft to match the stature of Banerjee. Suvendu Adhikari has not built a clout that could remotely equal the CM’s though the former minister floored her in his own turf in Nandigram. At the same time, it is a sad commentary on the part of the CBI that it vacillated over the matter for so long. In the meantime, some of the accused had crossed over to the BJP. Adhikari, for one. Video-tapes had clearly shown several top TMC functionaries taking bribes in a sting operation by the Narada News team operating in the guise of potential investors. Fact is, such bribe-taking is common today and spans across state governments.
Corruption is widespread because agencies like the CBI are taking things easy, its officials acting as “caged birds” of the powers-that-be at the Centre. Other investigation apparatuses like the Enforcement Directorate as also Vigilance agencies at the state and central levels are mostly serving no purpose other than dragging investigations which ultimately reach nowhere but become a mere tool for harassing opposition parties and governments. Punishing the guilty is an oddity in Indian situations today where powerful politicians and bureaucrats are involved. Investigations into another big scam involving the TMC in Bengal, the Sharada chit fund scam, also have not produced results. Those who lost money in the ponzy scam will only have to grin and bear with it. Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with a promise to clean the Augean stables but the grim reality is that he did too little about this in the past seven years.