The eastern Indian state of West Bengal is witnessing a political churning yet again. And this time India’s federal investigative agency CBI is at work to methodically sow the seeds of doubt in the minds of Bengali electorate so that corruption can be catapulted into prominence in a province where perception and reality have already coalesced.
Assigned by the Judiciary to investigate a financial scam involving Sudipta Sen’s Saradha group of companies, which siphoned-off investor’s money and went bust subsequently, the CBI is happily dancing to the political tune of its masters in the union government. Premier Narendra Modi’s BJP needed a manufactured hoopla on corruption to discredit Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the CBI obliged by selectively detaining Mamata’s Trinamool Congress’s senior functionaries, though politicians of all hues benefited from Sen’s business. Surely, the BJP, due to vested political interest, wants to digress from the real issue of providing solace to the victims of Bengal’s third major chit fund (a savings’ scheme enabling poor to convert small amounts into lump-sum) or Ponzi scam by way of repaying lost money and preventing further recurrence of such fraudulent activities.
The first two Ponzi scams occurred in the 1980s when the illustrious Communist leader Jyoti Basu was sitting pretty at the helm. Ashok Mitra, finance minister in Basu’s Cabinet, publicly acknowledged that millions of rupees from the scam could not be traced. Even today, a vast majority of the 1,31,000 duped investors are running from pillar to post.
Perhaps, the Communist leadership — now seeking Mamata’s arrest for allegedly mollycoddling the newest Ponzi scam-star Sudipta Sen — is suffering from selective amnesia. Can any left leader ever deny that it was during their three and a half decades long tenure in office, several Ponzi companies mushroomed in Bengal? Is it not a fact that successive Communist governments virtually facilitated the free-run of no less than 14,00 chit fund companies with a total capital of billions of rupees till they demitted office in 2011? Was the same Sudipta Sen not a beneficiary of Communist regime as he started his business in 2006 with the ruling party’s blessings? Not many are aware that Sen was a small-time land-broker in suburban Calcutta when land-sharks associated with the ruling Communists helped him grow bigger. Incidentally, some of his mentors happen to be Communist party’s zonal apparatchiks. Modi’s CBI, now fishing in Bengal’s troubled political waters, do not have the guts to let the real truth, about Sen, come to the fore because the deeper they dig the more skeletons that tumbles out of the Ponzi scam-star’s cupboard will expose the BJP’s involvement too.
It is indeed difficult for Modi’s trusted men in CBI to actually reveal who was Sen’s chit fund company’s ambassador-cum-business-promoter in the Andaman Islands or the names of some of the Ponzi scam-stars’ high profile well-wishers, running across political spectrum. This author learned reliably that Sen, in fact, had confessed to having donated to political outfits across-the-board for election and miscellaneous expenses.
Given Sen’s revelation, neither the BJP nor Congress or the Communists have that high moral ground to act Holier than Thou. Even some of the mainstream media who are running a relentless campaign against Mamata’s regime had displayed no inhibition in earning hefty advertisement revenue from Sen’s Ponzi company by promoting this dubious brand of his in their respective platforms. Do the honest and competent CBI investigators — as their chief certified recently — have the required wherewithal or intent to incorporate the income of these media conglomerates into the ambit of their investigation? After all, it is the duped investors’ money that Sen had used to advertise his shady business. Most importantly, will the judiciary resist the attempt to convert it into an instrumentality in BJP’s propaganda arsenal or continue to remain blindfolded as ever before?
Interestingly, Mamata’s political detractors have joined hands to befool the masses — not only educated elites but also the worst affected poor subaltern class. One of the salient features of Saradha scam, which is distinct from other such scams of the past, is that the majority of investors who deposited money are rural poor. The big question is why did they keep their hard-earned money in fraudulent companies instead of investing in the reliable small-savings schemes of the government? Moreover, is it practically possible for a man — who till the other day was a petty land-dealer — to acquire assets worth billions (including mines in Australia) with primarily low-end rural depositors’ money within a few years of launching this company? The answers to these vital queries can lead us to an equally revealing and hitherto unheard of aspect of this case. Knowledgeable experts believe Sen could actually have been managing a front organization, normally promoted by national security agencies dealing with espionage. Possibly, the untraced money has already been circulated back to the system and reinvested in entertainment business, claims a source. According to official filings available with Indian government’s Registrar of Companies, Sen’s Saradha is a commercial and industrial enterprise over which Mamata’s provincial government has no sway constitutionally. True, politicians, irrespective of colors, have milked such companies for fund. While they must be ticked-off, the government needs to educate the common man on ways of rationally evaluating investment opportunities. On their part, self-serving Bengali politicians and business tycoons opposing Mamata must realize that, at the end of the day, they are ruining the moral fabric of the Bengali society in their zeal to overthrow an elected regime.
