From cattle to coal smuggling, why Birbhum is under the scanner

Probes by the CBI and ED into several TMC leaders along with officers of the ECL, BSF, Customs department, and police officers have put the district in the spotlight.

Kolkata: From coal and cattle smuggling cases to the bribe-for-job scam, probes by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in which West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders are suspects have put the Birbhum district in the spotlight.

CBI and ED officials claim that although seemingly unrelated, the coal and cattle smuggling operations were carried out simultaneously by the same set of people who used the same network.  (HT Photo)

Still identified with Rabindranath Tagore who set up Visva Bharati, the state’s only central university at Santiniketan, and the wandering minstrels known as Bauls, Birbhum is now under the scanner because of the outcome of the raids and arrests made since 2020.

Months after he became the TMC’s only district-level leader to make it to the party’s national working committee without contesting an election, Anubrata Mondal — a trusted aide of chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the TMC’s Birbhum unit president — has been summoned by the CBI for the 10th time on Wednesday in the cattle smuggling case.

Mondal, who briefly faced the CBI once and ducked eight summon notices citing preoccupation or illness, may face “strong action” if he does not show up in Kolkata, said CBI officers at the city’s Nizam Palace office, where a meeting was held on Tuesday by joint director N Venugopal and additional director Ajay Bhatnagar who flew down from Delhi to work out the next strategy.

The parallel probes by the CBI and ED in the coal and cattle smuggling cases are unique because of the alleged involvement of some officers of the Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL), Border Security Force (BSF), Customs department and police officers deployed in Bengal. However, it is also crucial to the TMC because its leaders have been accused by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of being the beneficiaries of ill-gotten money.

Nine former and serving ECL officers, including two former general managers, were arrested from Kolkata by the CBI in mid-July. Before that, two BSF officers were taken into custody. At least three Indian Police Service (IPS) officers posted in Bengal were summoned to Delhi last year for questioning.

On the eve of the 2021 assembly polls, the CBI questioned Rujira Banerjee, the wife of Abhishek Banerjee, nephew of the chief minister and TMC national general secretary, in the coal smuggling case. Her sister, her sister's husband, and her sister's father-in-law were also interrogated.

Rujira Banerjee was questioned again in June this year, this time by the ED. Her husband, too, has faced ED officials twice since March. The interrogations have prompted the TMC to accuse the BJP-led government at the Centre of using probe agencies for political gain.

The Birbhum story

CBI and ED officials claim that although seemingly unrelated, the coal and cattle smuggling operations were carried out simultaneously by the same set of people who used the same network. They suspect that in both operations, Birbhum, which shares a border with Jharkhand, was used as a corridor as well as an operational zone.

The cattle smuggling case was registered in 2018 after J D Mathew, who served as BSF commandant in Bengal, was booked in Kerala. It is alleged that cattle shown as seized by the BSF at the Indo-Bangladesh border were undervalued and auctioned with the help of some Customs officers so that cow traders could buy the flocks back at a very low price and legally sell them again to their counterparts in Bangladesh.

The CBI conducted raids in 15 cities and towns in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh and properties belonging to Satish Kumar — who used to be a commandant in the South Bengal Frontier of the BSF in 2016 and 2017 — were sealed. Kumar was arrested in 2020 and released on bail from judicial custody.

Three Bengal-based cow traders, Muhammad Enamul Haque, Anarul Sheikh and Muhammad Gulam Mustafa, are the prime suspects. Haque was arrested by the CBI from Delhi in November 2020 and released on bail after he spent 13 months in judicial custody. The ED arrested him in February this year.

The CBI registered the coal smuggling case in November 2020 and the ED joined the probe later. It is alleged that illegally mined coal, worth several thousand crores of rupees, has been sold on the black market over several years by a racket operating in the western parts of Bengal where ECL — an organ of Coal India Limited — runs several mines.

On July 19, the CBI filed its first charge-sheet in the coal smuggling case against 41 people, including Anup Majhi, alias Lala, the alleged kingpin of the operation, and former TMC leader Vinay Mishra and the eight arrested ECL employees.

ED officials said that on July 21 they attached two properties belonging to a company owned by Vinay Mishra and his brother Vikash in East Burdwan district (adjacent to Birbhum) under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The officials said evidence showed that the Mishra brothers delivered proof of consent for business worth ₹731 crore between 2018 and 2020 with Majhi’s help.

The ED earlier raided 56 premises and attached assets worth ₹204.64 crore that belonged to Majhi and the other suspects.

Vinay Mishra, a Kolkata-based businessman, was a general secretary of the TMC’s youth wing that Abhishek Banerjee headed till early June 2021.

Vinay Mishra renounced his Indian citizenship in December 2020 and became a citizen of Vanuatu, a small island country in the southwest Pacific. The ED filed a petition at the Patiala Court in Delhi in July, praying that he be declared a fugitive economic offender.

Arrested by the ED, Vikash is now in judicial custody and has been named in the charge-sheet that CBI filed before a special court at Asansol in West Burdwan district on July 19 in the coal smuggling case.

The current status of the probes

Things took a new turn on August 8 when the CBI filed its third charge-sheet in the cattle smuggling case at the Asansol court against Vikash Mishra, Abdul Latif (an absconding suspect) and Sehgal Hossain, a West Bengal police constable deployed by the government as a bodyguard for Anubrata Mondal.

Hossain, who was arrested by the CBI on June 10, has been accused of accepting money from several people on Mondal’s behalf.

The CBI’s 41-page supplementary charge-sheet mentioned that as many as 59 properties and businesses, including petrol pumps, stone crushing units, brick kilns and four apartments, including two in Kolkata, are registered in the names of members of Sehgal’s family.

The CBI also gave the court records of phone calls the prime suspects made to Hossain’s mobile phones and claimed that it was Mondal who carried out the conversations.

Hossain’s lawyer Anirban Guha Thakurta argued before the judge, Rajesh Chakraborty, that although his client is a police constable the CBI did not seek the state’s consent before booking him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

The judge turned down Hossain’s bail petition when the CBI’s lawyer, Ajay Tripathi, described him as one of the principal conspirators.

CBI officials said Abdul Latif, the absconding man named in the charge-sheet, allegedly controlled the cattle markets not only in Birbhum but other states as well and the animals were ferried to the Bangladesh border by his men.

The Birbhum connection in the bribe-for-job case

In the school employment scam — in which former TMC secretary general and suspended cabinet minister Partha Chatterjee and his ‘close aide’ Arpita Mukherjee are prime suspects — the ED has traced several expensive properties in Bolpur.

ED officials said that on August 3 they raided a sprawling two-storey bungalow named Apa — ostensibly named so using the first letters of Arpita and Partha — and found some important documents in one of the rooms.

The property’s registration papers showed that Chatterjee and Mukherjee purchased it for ₹20 lakh in 2012 — a year after the TMC first came to power — from a Kolkata-based couple and the ownership rights were later transferred to Mukherjee. The sellers, however, could not be traced.

“Investigation is on regarding two more bungalows in Bolpur, an apartment and a house that used to given on rent for marriage and similar ceremonies till the arrests were made,” an ED official said on condition of anonymity.

The findings have prompted ED officials to believe that Birbhum, considered a TMC stronghold because of Mondal, was being used as a safe destination for investment.

Amid speculations that Mondal might be arrested soon, the BJP upped the ante on Tuesday.

“The probe agencies have given Anubrata Mondal enough breathing space. He should be arrested immediately,” said Suvendu Adhikari, leader of the opposition in the Bengal legislative assembly.

TMC leaders said their party has full faith in the judiciary.

“Law will take its own course but why is Adhikari so upset? He is a prime suspect in CBI cases as well. He should be more careful,” said minister Chandrima Bhattacharya, indirectly referring to the Narada and Saradha cases in which Adhikari figures among the suspects.