The Bengal unit of the BJP tried its best to put up a brave front amid a volley of arrows from the three other main political forces in the state, following the CBI slip-enabled bail in the RG Kar rape and murder case to Sandip Ghosh and Abhijit Mondal, which triggered outrage on Friday.

Former RG Kar Medical College and Hospital principal Sandip Ghosh and former officer-in-charge of Tala police station Abhijit Mondal were granted bail by a special court here after the central probe agency – reporting to Union home minister Amit Shah – failed to submit a charge-sheet against them within the stipulated 90 days. Ghosh, however, will remain in CBI custody as an accused in a case on alleged financial irregularities in the medical college during his tenure.

Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress, which found itself under unprecedented pressure during the peak of the “justice for RG Kar” movement, tore into the CBI and its “political bosses” over the agency’s inability.

“The state authorities had arrested the lone accused (Sanjay Ray) within 24 hours… a measure eventually acknowledged as correct even by the CBI. Yet, a lot of people thought ‘we want CBI’, so it was invited, and when it arrived there was a fiendish hullabaloo,” said Trinamool state general secretary Kunal Ghosh.

“Those that dislike Kolkata Police, will they equally dislike the CBI now?” he asked. “The parents of the victim, had they kept faith in Kolkata Police, capital punishment would have been ordered by now.”

CBI had arrested Ghosh and Mondal on September 14 on charges of “destruction of evidence” after the junior doctor’s body was found on August 9 in a seminar hall of the emergency building of the RG Kar medical College and Hospital. Their alleged role had come under the scanner after doctors demanding justice had alleged that the hospital authorities and Kolkata Police had jointly destroyed evidence.

“Behind all this was essentially a battle of doctors’ cliques and the jumping about of a bunch of anti-government people and the Opposition here. They had come together to misinform, disinform, and mal-inform the people, in an attempt to influence the wider public opinion,” alleged Kunal Ghosh.

The Congress’s chief spokesperson for Bengal, Soumya Aich Roy, lambasted not only the CBI and its alleged degeneration under the saffron regime but also the allegedly secret entente between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister
Mamata Banerjee.

“Was it all a mere coincidence? Delhi’s Dada (Modi) will not put Bengal’s Didi (Mamata) in an awkward spot, so he gifted her this deft save. Now the prime accused will go about leading their lives in freedom, and Didi’s people will shout from the rooftops about how great Kolkata Police under her as home minister are,” said Aich Roy.

“This is a jointly produced drama by the BJP and Trinamool, which is why no central agency probe — especially those investigating corruption — in Bengal concludes properly. Dada and Didi, their governments complete and complement each other,”
he added.

Virtually echoing him, CPM central committee Sujan Chakraborty added that the central agencies under the BJP-led Centre work with the core motivation of aiding the saffron camp’s political agenda.

“It is becoming increasingly clear to the people that such a vast, able investigating force is being made to act shambolic to please its political masters in Delhi,” he said.

The BJP’s state unit chief Sukanta Majumdar pleaded feebly to defend the CBI — and the Union government in which he is now a junior minister — and blamed Kolkata Police instead for allegedly destroying the evidence at the site of the grisly crime’s occurrence before Calcutta High Court handed the case to the central agency.

“After the five-day danse macabre at the place of occurrence, the CBI have found nothing. They won’t find anything,” claimed a visibly uncomfortable Majumdar.

“Central agencies follow rules and procedure, bail is granted by courts not the agency. The agencies are overburdened. They are doing their very best… unlike those at the Mamata Banerjee government’s disposal,” he added.