The first bail in the cash-for-jobs scam in Bengal was granted by the Calcutta High Court on Monday when Justice Tirthankar Ghosh allowed Satarupa Bhattacharya, wife of one of the prime accused in the case Manik Bhattacharya, to walk out of Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody on two personal sureties of Rs 50,000 each.

The day also marked the unprecedented arrest of four school teachers accused of securing recruitment by means of bribes. The accused were marked as witnesses in a recruitment scam charge sheet of the Central Bureau of Investigation and were summoned by the special CBI court in Alipore. Their bail prayers were subsequently rejected by Judge Arpan Chattopadhyay who remanded them in judicial custody for 14 days and sent them to the Presidency Correctional Home.

So far, people booked by the central agencies are suspected conspirators of the scam belonging either to the political fraternity or officials of the various school recruitment bodies and their kin. This was the first time that beneficiaries, too, were arrested.

The grounds for Satarupa Bhattacharya’s conditional bail, who is in jail for the last six months after a special Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) court granted her remand, was that the agency failed to submit evidences before court to directly implicate her to the scam and as such the Bench found it “no longer necessary to keep the accused in custody”. The court found no cause of apprehension from the ED that she may escape or tamper with evidence. The defendant was, however, directed by the court to not travel outside West Bengal and keep her passport deposited with the ED.

Her husband, the former state primary education board chairman and Trinamul MLA Manik Bhattacharya, though continues to languish in jail. So does her son Souvik, who was arrested by the ED together with Satarupa in February this year after the duo had surrendered before the PMLA court on receipt of summons. The ED found Rs 1.45 crore parked in a joint bank account which Satarupa held with her husband and alleged before court that she is suspected to have facilitated transactions to the tune of Rs 2 crores.

Fiercely opposing Satarupa’s bail the agency called the defendant “Lady Macbeth” of the recruitment scam. “She isn’t a housewife. She wasn’t a bystander in the scam. In fact, she was actively involved in it. She was directly responsible for ruining the future of thousands of prospective teachers who are victims of the scam. She was making leisure trips to foreign lands like China, Japan, Tanzania, South Africa and Egypt from 2013 onwards while the job seekers sat on the roads and wept,” the ED counsel argued. The agency had previously prayed for a custodial trial of the suspect.

Unimpressed by that line of argument Judge Ghosh pulled up the agency for not being able to come up with any direct evidence of her involvement in the crime. “You are only making allegations which you haven’t been able to prove. There is no evidence of monetary transactions or proceeds of the corruption which can be traced back to her. You never even arrested her. She was sent to custody by the court when she had appeared before it responding to a summons. She should have been granted bail by the lower court itself when she had appealed for it on January 7. If you are so sure of her involvement, why did you not arrest her?” the Judge observed, calling the affairs at the special ED court “disturbing”.

The clincher against ED’s submission was perhaps the fact the agency never interrogated Satarupa even once during her judicial custody. “The ED wants a custodial trial. But the only time they examined the accused was in November last year before she was arrested,” Satarupa’s counsel argued in court.

Meanwhile, the arrest of four school teachers, all from Murshidabad district, is bound to send shock waves across the thousands of suspected members of the fraternity who have received illegal appointments in return for bribes. The day’s arrests raised questions on why criminal proceedings should not be initiated against the other illegal appointees who have similarly benefited from the scam and have participated in the crime in quite the same manner as the arrested teachers.

Responding to the judge’s query on why the four teachers were treated as “witnessed” and not “accused”, the CBI said it had examined them to get to the depths of the modus operandi of the scam and had as such mentioned their names in the charge sheet.

Rejecting that logic, the court observed that the teachers in question were “participants” in the crime and gave their arrest order.