The bail petitions of former Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee and four former officials accused of being part of a school recruitment racket came up for hearing on Thursday before a “third judge” of Calcutta High Court, Justice Tapabrata Chakrabarty.
A division bench of the high court had earlier failed to decide on the matter with one judge opining in favour of granting bail and the other declining the pleas.
The bench then referred the matter to the chief justice who assigned the case to Justice Chakrabarty.
The hearing is likely to continue next week as the CBI lawyers sought time to present their argument.
Senior advocates Sekhar Basu, Milan Mukherjee and Sandipan Ganguly, who represented Chatterjee and the four others, sought to know how a former minister could influence the probe or tamper with evidence.
Asked by Justice Chakrabarty about the parameter of being “influential”, Mukherjee, who represented Chatterjee, said his client was a “no one now”.
“He (Chatterjee) has been in jail for more than two years. It would be wrong to say he is influential. He is no one now,” Mukherjee said.
Chatterjee was arrested in 2022 and has been in custody since. The trial in the corruption case has yet to start.
His lawyers said “bail is my (Chatterjee’s) right”.
The arguments came a day after the Supreme Court observed that granting bail to the former minister in a money laundering case, related to the school recruitment scam, would send a wrong message to society.
The apex court division bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan made the observations while dealing with an appeal for bail filed by Chatterjee in the ED case. The apex court has reserved its judgment.
Earlier, submissions for bail were made before the high court 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 Chatterjee and the other accused. Justice Sinha declined to entertain the pleas saying the accused, being “influential”, could influence the investigation. The judge also cited the fact that the CBI had sought the state’s concurrence to start proceedings against the accused but the nod was yet to come.
The advocates representing the former minister and four others — Subires Bhattacharyya, Kalyanmoy Ganguly, Ashok Saha and Shanti Prasad Sinha — said on Thursday the matter of state concurrence had “no connection” with their clients not being granted bail.
They also cited that their clients were not holding any position now. Bhattacharya is a former vice-chancellor of North Bengal University who was also the chairman of the school service commission (SSC).
Ganguly is a former secondary education board president, Saha is a former SSC chairman and Sinha is a former chief adviser to the SSC. All five are in jail.
