E-Paper
The cash-for-jobs scandal and the unravelling of Partha-Arpita saga
Now, four years later, the relationship between the two, and their role in the cash-for-jobs scandal over the recruitment of teachers for government schools is at the heart of an Enforcement Directorate investigation.
On a recent day in Kolkata, a stack of bamboo is being sorted out on a plot of land next to a club in the city’s tony Tollygunge area. The puja season is coming; it is a busy time of the year for Naktala Udyan Sangha, one of the popular Durga Puja committees in Kolkata, whose chief patron was Trinamool Congress strongman and West Bengal minister, Partha Chatterjee. It was during the Durga Puja in 2018 that Chatterjee’s relationship with a one-time model Arpita Mukherjee came to be noticed (although the two are believed to have met a few years previously). It was a few months after his wife‘s death.
Now, four years later, the relationship between the two, and their role in the cash-for-jobs scandal over the recruitment of teachers for government schools is at the heart of an Enforcement Directorate investigation.
Mukherjee, now 37, owns three flats in posh neighbourhoods in Kolkata, four luxury cars, and several other movable and immovable properties. In all, ED has seized ₹50 crore in cash and gold worth ₹5 crore from the flats. According to ED officials who asked not to be named, Mukherjee has told them that Chatterjee used the flats as an “ATM”. The two were arrested July 23 and are in ED custody till August 3.
The directorate conducted the raids to probe the money laundering angle in the alleged teacher and school staff recruitment scam in which hundreds of unqualified people are suspected to have paid bribes to be selected by the School Service Commission and primary education department when Chatterjee was education minister between 2014 and 2021. The Calcutta high court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to conduct a probe and the ED, while conducting a parallel investigation, found the money, bundles of ₹2000 and ₹500 currency notes, stashed in the flats.
Faced with adverse public reaction, pressure from opposition parties and rumblings within her party, chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday relieved Chatterjee of the charges of state departments, commerce, industry and public enterprises, information technology and parliamentary affairs and the Trinamool Congress suspended him, with the rider that he could return if proven innocent. “I am victim of conspiracy,” Chatterjee told reporters on Friday.
Rise of Arpita Mukherjee
Mukherjee was born in a modest household in at Belgharia on the northern outskirts Kolkata. “Her father used to work at a Central government office. Mukherjee was offered a job after he died in harness but she was not interested,” Mukherjee’s septuagenarian mother, Minati Mukherjee, told reporters on July 27, when ED officials raided her house.
Minati Mukherjee said that her daughter did not listen to her. “I wanted to get her married but she would not marry. My younger daughter got married but she (Mukherjee) did not marry,” Minati Mukherjee said, adding that she had no clue what Mukherjee was doing, nor the nature of her relationship with Chatterjee. “She never told me anything. I only know she works in Odiya movies, serials and is associated with a production firm,” Minati Mukherjee said, recalling that Mukherjee had come to meet her three days before her arrest.
Mukherjee graduated from Bhairab Ganguly College at Belgharia in 2002 and first tried her luck in the modelling industry in 2004 before landing some small roles in a television serial followed by roles in Bengali, Odiya and Tamil movies.
Also Read | Arpita Mukherjee says she had no access to rooms where money was kept: ED
Mukherjee was given a break in Bengali film industry by filmmaker Sanghamitra Chaudhary, who joined the BJP and is now the president of the party’s south Kolkata unit. “Arpita worked in three of my films between 2009 and 2011. She was a pretty girl from an ordinary family. She travelled in trains and buses before buying a used car. She modelled for some saree brands and landed roles in Odisha and Tamil Nadu. In Kolkata, filmmaker Anup Sengupta gave her a break too,” Chaudhary said.
Bengali actor Sourav Saha, who worked with Mukherjee in one of the movies, described her as someone who thought she had arrived. “She was selected for a small role. We did not share screen space but I saw her work. She did not appear to be interested in learning. Rather, she had the attitude of a successful heroine.”
The next time he saw her was on a poster.
“I forgot her completely till I saw her photo on a big hoarding in 2019 put up by the Naktala Udayan Sangha that had chosen her as the model for the theme of their community Durga puja.”
Chaudhary said she felt “bad” for Mukherjee. “She kept her mother at the family’s old home in Belgharia although she was living in luxury. Probably she was too scared to let her mother know what she was doing.”
Her Partha connection
TMC leaders who did not wish to be named said Chatterjee probably met Mukherjee sometime around 2014-15, when her work in modelling and films dwindled, but that the duo was seen together more frequently since 2018, a year after his wife died. Nothing much is known about their relationship between 2014-15 and 2018.
Mukherjee came to prominence in 2019 when she became the poster girl of Naktala Udayan Sangha’s Durga puja and was seen speaking to West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee during the puja inauguration with Chatterjee and other senior TMC leaders in the background. The video of her speaking with Banerjee was released on social media by BJP. The TMC did not question the authenticity of the video. In the video, Banerjee can be heard asking Mukherjee if she could speak Odiya and about her roles in Odiya and Bengali films. “What can I do if someone is present on the dais? The woman was standing there. They are saying she is Partha’s friend. How am I supposed to know who is friend to whom?” Banerjee said at a public event 48 hours after the two were arrested.
Additional solicitor general Suryaprakash V Raju on July 25 told a Kolkata court that Mukherjee and Chatterjee jointly bought a plot of land and were “very close” to each other. This was on the basis of ED’s seizure of 17 documents from Partha Chatterjee’s house. Some of them were deeds of properties in the name of Mukherjee. One the deeds dates back to 2012, likely resetting the chronology of their relationship. “The two had a very close relationship. Both were in regular contact by phone,” the ASG said. Chatterjee’s lawyer felt constrained to add that it was not an “intimate relationship”.
According to the ED officials, Chatterjee has not spoken anything about the money found in the flats, but Mukherjee has said the former, or his men used to come and hoard money in the flats. “She says she had no access to the money. And that while she knew they were keeping money there, she didn’t have any idea about the amount,” one of the officials added, citing details revealed by Mukherjee during her interrogation.
ED is also looking at the stake held by Partha Chatterjee in a saree dealership in Kolkata; Mukherjee was its model till recently. “The business of the dealership had grown manifold in recent years. From a small shop, they now have a four-storey showroom. We are trying to find whether Chatterjee and Mukherjee invested some ill-gotten money there,” said a ED official quoted above.
TMC leaders told HT that the closeness between the two was well-known within the party circles. “She used to manage all his affairs including money and home since his daughter got married a few years ago,” said a senior TMC leader who asked not to be named.
Companies that own properties
Although ED has so far raided three apartments that Mukherjee used and seized documents related to at least a dozen more properties, HT found that none was registered in the name of either Mukherjee or Chatterjee.
The two apartments raided on July 27 at Belgharia and the four apartments at the Haridevpur condominium are registered in the names of two companies of which Mukherjee and her brother-in-law, Kalyan Dhar, are directors.
Of the two companies, Sentry Engineering Private Ltd was registered on January 16, 2001, ten years before the TMC came to power. The other one, Echhay Entertainment Private Ltd, was registered on October 29, 2014.
Sentry Engineering, which has been shown to be engaged in manufacturing “specialized machinery” has an authorized share capital of ₹10 lakh. Echhay Entertainment has been recorded as a business firm with a share capital of ₹1 lakh, according to filing in the Registrar of Companies website. The annual balance sheets of both companies were filed on March 31 last year.
Claiming to be a poor man who drives cars for a living, Dhar said he had no idea that these companies existed. “How can I possibly own a company? I drive cars and do odd jobs. I went to the Belgharia apartments so many times. Mukherjee never told me about any money being stashed there,” he said.
Retired Indian Police Service officer Nazrul Islam wondered whether the CM was aware about the relationship between Chatterjee and Mukherjee. “Within 200 metres of where I live near the Eastern Bypass, there is a three-storied house which has been given on rent to a private hospital. Are we to believe that the chief minister knew nothing about these? What was the state intelligence branch doing?”
The property Islam referred to was registered in the name of Sentry Engineering.
HT also found that although a sum of ₹21.90 crore was seized from Flat 1-A in Tower 2 of the Haridevpur property, its pending common area maintenance and LPG bills, totaling to ₹9,419, have not been paid. This apartment is registered as the official address of Sentry Engineering in the records of the registrar of companies.
Members of the residents’ association said that a sum of ₹17,442 was pending against the three-apartment unit comprising unit no 18-D, 19-D and 20-D in Tower-2. These are registered in the name of Echhay Entertainment.
“One of these three units is used exclusively to keep around a dozen dogs and Chatterjee often came to spend time with Mukherjee and the pets. There are Rottweilers, Golden Retrievers, French Bulldogs, Pugs and Labradors. A man who takes care of the dogs permanently lives in the penthouse,” a member of the residents’ association said.
He said Mukherjee avoided paying the common area maintenance bills for a while which the residents find surprising after the seizure of so much cash. ED found that Chatterjee was never seen visiting the two Belgharia apartments against which a sum of ₹21,000 was pending towards maintenance cost.
How it unravelled
The Chatterjee-Mukherjee saga may have remained an open secret had the Calcutta high court not started a probe into the teacher recruitment scandal in December 2021 by appointing a committee headed by retired judge Ranjit Kumar Bagh to look into it.
The single bench of justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay on March 31, asked CBI to probe the school service commission (SSC) scandal after the Bagh committee said that a high-powered supervisory committee approved by Chatterjee was at the heart of the irregularities in the recruitment of teachers and school staff. On May 18, justice Gangopadhyay ordered CBI to question Chatterjee and also gave the agency the liberty to take him into custody.
The state government challenged justice Gangopadhyay’s order before a larger bench, which rejected the government’s plea. “The so-called super committee setup by the then minister-in-charge of the school education department and headed by its advisor played a key role in the public scam,” the division bench of justice Subrata Talukdar and justice Ananda Kumar Mukherjee said in its order on May 18 upholding the single bench’s order on CBI probe.
CBI registered an FIR against Chatterjee saying that the then school education minister’s order to set up a committee to supervise and guide the commission with pending recruitment was in violation of the School Service Commission Act, 1997. Chatterjee reportedly told CBI that he was not aware of the day-to-day functioning of the committee that recommended appointments.
CBI has also booked four former SSC officials and an official of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) in the case including SP Sinha, former convenor of the committee constituted by Chatterjee, and Samarjit Acharya, former programmer with SSC. CBI told the Calcutta high court that Sinha and Acharya played an important role in the SSC appointment scam and were very close to the minister. “Names of people who were illegally recruited were supplied by Sinha,” the CBI report said.
While the CBI was looking at criminal conspiracy in the scam, ED was investigating the money angle to the scam. Islam said: “It has been alleged that each candidate paid anything between ₹10 lakh and ₹20 lakh. If 2,0000 people paid ₹20 lakh each then it is certainly possible to raise this kind of an amount.”
