Hours after TMC MP Sudip Bandyopadhyay was arrested by CBI in connection with the Rose Valley chit fund scam, the BJP Kolkata office was attacked by TMC’s student wing. Another TMC MP Tapas Pal was also arrested by the CBI on Friday for questioning in the same case.

West Bengal CM Mamta Banerjee appears to be thoroughly rattled by the noose tightening around her senior party leaders, and lashed out in typical fashion –

Amit Shah, Narendra Modi should be arrested, PM Modi does not understand Indian politics :Mamata Banerjee,WB CM pic.twitter.com/Fx9FUVpps3

— ANI (@ANI) January 3, 2017

The Rose Valley Group of Companies is an alleged Ponzi firm which has duped small investors in West Bengal, Odisha, Assam, Jharkhand, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura and Andhra Pradesh of nearly Rs 17,000 crore – around 18 lakh families are said to be affected. The scam is believed to be the biggest ponzi frauds in Bharat and the scam itself is at least seven times bigger than Saradha chit fund scam which rocked West Bengal in 2013.

Mamata also said yesterday that “It isn’t a big deal if I am to believe for argument’s sake that Sudip took Rs 2-3 lakh for the elections.” Bandopadhyay was arrested after he refused to answer questions such as: Why he attended a delegate meeting of the Rose Valley Group when as member of the parliamentary standing committee on finance, he was aware of the alleged irregularities involving the promoters of Rose Valley? Who were the sponsors of his foreign tours or who gifted him a sedan car?

Rose Valley & Saradha Ponzi Scams – Fleecing the Poor

Before these Rose Valley scam arrests, West Bengal had been rocked by the Saradha chit fund scam in 2013 which saw the following TMC bigwigs being arrested: two TMC Rajya Sabha MPs – Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose; Sports and Transport minister in the West Bengal TMC Government & a close aide of Mamata – Madan Mitra.

The Saradha mastermind Sudipta Sen had also purchased one of Mamata’s paintings for Rs 1.8 crore, which raised several eyebrows. Incidentally, Nalini Chidambaram, wife of then Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram, also received over Rs. 1 crore from an accused in the Saradha scam for ‘legal consultancy’ services.

Kunal Ghosh, who was recently released on bail after spending over 3 years in jail, has revealed that the rot goes right to the top in TMC. IN a 36-minute video recorded earlier and broadcast on a local Bengali channel, Ghosh put his party in great discomfiture by directly linking chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool’s national general secretary Mukul Roy (number two in the party), another Rajya Sabha MP, with the Saradha chit fund scam.

Kunal made several charges against Mamata – from recommending hefty donations for Durga Puja organisers and football clubs to abetting extortion by her party MPs to not initiating any action against the Saradha group despite being alerted by the union corporate affairs ministry about the business house.

He also revealed how Mamata met Saradha chief Sudipta Sen and Rose Valley chief Gautam Kundu at Delo near Kalimpong where Sen, according to Kunal, lay out the details of his media plan to her and “promised to support her in realising her prime ministerial ambitions”.

Ghosh has alleged involvement of two more TMC Rajya Sabha MPs in the Saradha scam –  Swapan Sadhan Bose and KD Singh and a Lok Sabha MP Suvendu Adhikari. This means that across Saradha and Rose Valley scams, 7 Rajya Sabha MPs, 1 Lok Sabha MP, 1 State Minister and CM Mamata herself are under the CBI scanner. And the list is growing bigger with each passing day – 

TMC MLAs & MPs including Saugat Roy, Dinesh Trivedi & Partha Chatterjee reach Kolkata's CBI Office pic.twitter.com/LaUJt1Yjt9

— ANI (@ANI) January 3, 2017

Narada Sting – TMC Corruption Caught on Camera

In March 2016, a digital news media outlet Narada News released a sting video “X FILES: TMC Leaders Exposed By Narada News, Caught Accepting Bribes On Camera”. The video shows nearly all the top leaders of the TMC, including party vice president Mukul Roy, three Cabinet Ministers and six sitting MPs, accepting bribe that ranges from Rs. 5 lakh to Rs. 20 lakh for favours to a fictitious company, Impex Consultancy. Later they released another video which showed another Lok Sabha TMC MP Aparupa Poddar accepting bribe money.

Last heard, the Calcutta High Court was probing the case and an interim stay had been ordered pending some affidavits from the West Bengal state Government. When almost the entire TMC party apparatus stands accused in the Narada sting, can we really expect an impartial probe to be carried out under the oversight of the TMC Government in WB?

Conclusion

What we are seeing in the case of TMC is not unique – virtually every regional party in Bharat which claims to be pro-poor and secular, is a front for the most corrupt, nepotistic, casteist, lawless and communal elements in our polity. In an earlier article ‘How Corrupt & Nepotistic is ‘Secular, Progressive’ Politics?‘ we had analyzed how other regional players similar to TMC – NCP, SP, BSP, RJD, AAP – exhibited the same traits.

The one thing common to all these parties is that they can be called franchisees of the Congress model – spout secular, socialist gibberish in manifestoes; appeal to caste, regional identities during elections; brazenly pander to Muslim and Christian votebanks; give free hand for loot and plunder to party leaders post elections; hand out just enough doles to keep the electorate happy but still in poverty.

And these are the political forces which our mainstream media, establishment intellectuals and academia cheers as the defenders of the Constitutional ideals of secularism & socialism. All their sins are forgotten, as long as the ‘communal, fascist’ Hindutva forces are kept at bay!

But one fact is unmistakable for any neutral observer of Bharat’s politics – BJP rates far higher than Congress and its clones today because of one single factor..the RSS influence on BJP. It is the RSS emphasis on nationalism, simplicity and probity in public life, cause over individuals and Dharmic roots which has ensured that BJP has by & large escaped the usual ills of Indian politics. And this is the fact that the secular-liberal ecosystem will do their damnedest to hide from the public –  hence you will not hear even a fraction of the outrage over the corrupt Mamata regime that you heard for the dubious charges levelled against BJP’s BS Yedyurappa in 2012.

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