Mamata Banerjee said Ajit Doval was the one telling the CBI what to do
As a team of the Central Bureau of Investigation showed up outside the home of Kolkata Police chief in a chit fund case, the chief minister of West Bengal and the state's top cop rushed to Rajeev Kumar's home on Sunday evening. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who had described Mr Kumar as the best police officer in the country and accused the BJP of engineering the controversy in a tweet, addressed the media at Mr Kumar's home amid much drama.
"How dare you come to a police commissioner's home without a warrant?" Mamata Banerjee demanded to know and justified her reaction saying, "it is my job to protect my officers".
But the CBI's Joint Director Pankaj Srivastava said they did not need any order or warrant as it was a Supreme Court-ordered investigation.
The West Bengal chief minister alleged that Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor, is doing "whatever the Prime Minister wants him to do. He is the one giving instructions to the CBI".
"They summoned CBI officers and told them 'Kuchh toh karo, kuchh toh karo'. BJP is a thief party, we are not. In the name of chit fund, they are doing whatever they want to do. We are the ones who had the chit fund owners arrested," Ms Banerjee alleged.
The agency's interim boss, M Nageswara Rao, said that the West Bengal police aren't cooperating, therefore, "we will approach the Supreme Court on Monday".
The Trinamool chief claimed that the BJP is "targeting us" for organising a rally of anti-BJP parties. The chief minister is sitting on a dharna in Metro Channel area in central Kolkata "to save the constitution".
Ms Banerjee had hosted a grand rally of over 20 opposition parties last month where top leaders spoke about the need to set aside their differences to form a united opposition that can fight the BJP in the upcoming national election.
"His (PM Modi) exit bell has rung. His expiry date is over. Their five years are over. People of India and Bengal are disgusted by the BJP. We have to uproot Modi else India cannot be saved," Mamata Banerjee said.
Mamata Banerjee is sitting on a dharna in Metro Channel area in central Kolkata
Rajeev Kumar, who headed the special investigation team probing the Saradha and Rose Valley Ponzi scams that had surfaced in Bengal in 2013, was asked to help with the investigation when several key documents of the cases allegedly went missing. Over the last two years, he had received several summons for questioning, but he neither responded nor showed up, CBI sources said.
The chief minister also expressed anger over allegations made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his rallies in the state on Saturday. "You saw the kind of language PM Modi used in his rally," she said.
PM Modi had accused Mamata Banerjee of "strangling democracy" and putting the state's development in the slow lane. He also alleged since she can't handle praise for the Prime Minister, she was withdrawing from centre-run schemes, including Ayushman Bharat Yojana or Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana.
Intensifying his attack, the Prime Minister claimed that the Bengal government was killing the aspirations of the middle class through "triple T -- Trinamool Tolabazi Tax". ''Tolabazi'' roughly translates to an act of organised extortion.
In her fiery comeback, Mamata Banerjee called him the "grandfather of corruption".
"During the last five years, they have tortured people, killed farmers, lynched police and organised riots. In the name of demonetisation, they destroyed the economy," she alleged as she counted the controversial Rafale fight jet deal among the top scams under the Modi government.