Lawyers representing former education minister Partha Chatterjee and four former state government officials accused of being part of a school recruitment racket submitted in court on Tuesday that Chatterjee was no longer a member of any political party and hence should be granted bail.

The bail petition came up before a “third judge”, Justice Tapabrata Chakrabarty of Calcutta High Court, on Tuesday.

The CBI has tagged Chatterjee as the “kingmaker” of the alleged irregularities and objected to the bail petition.

Senior advocates Milan Mukherjee, Sekhar Basu and Sandipan Ganguly, representing Chatterjee and the four others, said former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was far more influential than Chatterjee but was granted bail.

Advocate Mukherjee, who was representing Chatterjee, cited multiple judgments of the Supreme Court in support of his prayer for bail. The former minister is in judicial custody and lodged at Presidency Correctional Home.

The hearing could not be concluded on Tuesday as the CBI lawyer said he needed more time to prepare for the arguments in response to the submissions made by the defence lawyers.

The court scheduled the next hearing for December 17.

Chatterjee, who was arrested in 2022, has spent more than two years in jail in connection with a case whose trial is yet to start.

The bail prayer for all five was earlier heard by the division bench of Justice Arijit Banerjee and Justice Apurba Kumar Sinha.

The senior judge on the bench, Justice Banerjee, was in favour of granting bail to the five accused. But Justice Sinha had declined to grant them bail saying the accused were “influential” and also citing the fact that the state government’s concurrence to start proceedings against Chatterjee and the rest had been pending for two years.

The advocates representing Chatterjee and the four others — Subires Bhattacharya, Kalyanmoy Ganguly, Ashok Saha and Shanti Prasad Sinha — said during the last hearing that the matter of state concurrence had “no connection” with their clients not being granted bail.

The lawyers also defended their clients saying they were not holding any position now and would not be able to influence the probe.

Bhattacharya is a former vice-chancellor of North Bengal University who was also chairman of the school service commission.

Ganguly was a state secondary education board president, Saha was a chairman of the school service commission and Sinha was a chief adviser to the commission.