The BJP Friday trained its guns on the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal saying the party stood badly exposed after the Supreme Court order directing a CBI investigation into the Saradha and other chit fund scams. “We welcome the Supreme Court order. As far as Saradha is concerned, TMC is badly exposed,” BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said at a press conference here. Noting that “the state government lawyer was opposing the probe till today”, Javadekar wondered why TMC was opposed to it. “We are asking why was this government opposed to the CBI probe till the last moment? Because it was afraid of its nexus getting exposed. There is a clear nexus between the leaders and the government and this Saradha. People are defrauded and you are benefited. That’s the quid pro quo,” the BJP leader claimed. He termed the Saradha scam as the worst where public money was looted “with the connivance and blessings of the government of the day.” “We want the CBI and the ED to focus on the money trail because what the people have lost is Rs 5,000 crore and what the TMC government was planning to give is only Rs 500 crore. It’s a pittance,” the BJP Rajya Sabha MP said. The Mamata Banerjee government had formed a one-man commission of enquiry of Justice (retd) Shyamal Sen and set up a corpus of Rs 500 crore to pay back the investors, numbering into lakhs. Asked about state finance minister Amit Mitra’s statement that the probe order came just two days before the final phase of the Lok Sabha poll, Javadekar said, “I don’t expect this from Amit Mitra. He knows how the courts function. He is not a rowdy of the TMC, but he has started talking like them. It shows the company he is keeping.”
