Threat of President's rule looms over Bengal

The goings-on in Kolkata since Sunday evening, when the CBI tried to raid the residence of the city’s police commissioner and question him in the Saradha and Rose Valley chit scam cases, is evidently a political farce initiated by the Centre against the West Bengal government. What the Centre and the BJP did not bargain for is that the CM and Trinamul Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee would play the game with gusto. The CM seized the opportunity for public showmanship offered by the  Union government, and set up a roadside canopy to stage a protest dharna or sit-in at a location at the famous Esplanade, the very place where she had sat on a 26-day dharna in 2006 when she ran an eventually successful campaign against the then CPI(M)-led Left Front government on the Singur issue.

It is unlikely that any of this might have happened if the Lok Sabha election were not round the corner. It does appear that the Centre’s move to raid the police commissioner’s residence by deploying a posse of some 40 CBI officials (who are cops in civvies) — and the retaliatory step of the Kolkata Police to detain some of them — was a scrappy, but choreographed move. The likely intent was to give the impression of breakdown of the constitutional machinery in the state, based on which Article 356 of the Constitution can be invoked and central rule imposed. The BJP may want nothing better than to have national polls in West Bengal with the Centre calling the shots after the dismissal of the Banerjee government.

This appears to be a variant of the pre-poll modus operandi being adopted in Karnataka where political circles believe legislative instability (locally called “Operation Lotus”) was sought to be engineered by the BJP as a precursor to bringing President’s rule weeks before the Lok Sabha election to give the saffron party situational advantage. In the West Bengal case, the role of governor K.N. Tripathi, a RSS veteran who once played a highly controversial part as Speaker of the UP Assembly, needs to be watched with care.

The Centre’s view is that the CBI went to the Kolkata police commissioner’s residence as it was directed by the Supreme Court to investigate the chit fund scam. Although the scam must be investigated, the Centre’s explanation is hardly convincing. The SC order is two years old, but CBI’s zeal has become evident on election-eve, just as was the case recently with the agency raiding former UP CM and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav. Earlier, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s office was raided, confirming that the BJP’s opponents are being singled out for attention. Meanwhile, former TMC leader Mukul Roy, who defected to BJP and is a person of interest in the chit fund cases, has not been troubled by the CBI. The misuse of central agencies against a state government hurts our federal polity.