For a change, those who were not arrested drew almost the same, if not more, degree of attention as those who were arrested.

The exclusion of the names of Suvendu Adhikari and Mukul Roy from the CBI chargesheet in the Narada case prised open the question why the two erstwhile Trinamul leaders who are now in the BJP weren’t arrested by the CBI.

Apart from the four arrested — Subrata Mukherjee, Firhad Hakim, Madan Mitra and Sovan Chatterjee — the chargesheet that was submitted before a special CBI court on Monday named S.M.H Mirza, the then superintendent of police in Burdwan.

Neither Roy nor Adhikari found mention in the chargesheet in the case, which dates back to 2016, even though they were among the 13 named in the FIR filed by the central investigating agency back in April 2017.

Mukul Roy File picture

Two years after drawing up the FIR, the CBI had arrested Mirza in September 2019. The suspended IPS officer was later granted bail.

The exclusion of Adhikari and Roy from the chargesheet was greeted with surprise by Mathew Samuel, who carried out the sting operation.

“I am happy with the arrests made this morning... but I wondered what happened to Suvendu Adhikari,” he said.

“I went to his office and gave him the money. It was recorded properly and then forensically tested in Chandigarh and Gujarat. I had given my visuals to the forensic lab in Hyderabad and they went to Gujarat and Chandigarh and all these places.”

“This is very sad,”

said Samuel, who faced several rounds of questioning from the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate in Calcutta.

Trinamul leader and lawyer Kalyan Banerjee asked why Adhikari and Roy had been spared by the central agency.

“I think the first person to be arrested should be Mukul Roy.... IPS officer Mirza, who was earlier arrested in this case, had said in his statement to the court that he took money because Mukul Roy had told him to. Still, the CBI did not act,” he said.

There was no official word about the exclusions. In the absence of a credible explanation, a perception could gain ground that the CBI was being used as a blackmailing tool to intimidate political rivals to switch sides or face the music.

Sources in the CBI said the agency had received sanction from the competent authority to act against the public servants for allegedly receiving gratification from the sting operator after it had investigated the case, which was drawn up on April 16, 2017, following a Calcutta High Court order.

“Sanction for one more accused who was then the SP was also received. He was earlier arrested,” said R.C. Joshi of the CBI. “Further investigations are on.”

Senior CBI officers said they had sought sanction from the Lok Sabha Speaker in April 2019 for prosecuting Adhikari and others, but it had yet to come.

“We have sent a reminder on this appeal. The official nod is yet to come. Once that happens, the law will take its own course,” a senior CBI officer said.

Within hours of the arrest of the four, social media had exploded with Twitter users questioning why the two BJP leaders, now elected MLAs in Bengal, had not been named in the CBI chargesheet.

In the run-up to the 2016 Assembly polls, the BJP had used the video of the sting operation to portray Trinamul leaders as corrupt. Across party offices and social media platforms, the video had become one of the BJP’s strongest weapons against Trinamul.

Last December, a day after Adhikari had switched sides in the presence of Amit Shah, the video was removed from the BJP’s official YouTube channel. The BJP’s Bengal leadership had no answer why the video had been removed. Senior leaders couldn’t hide their embarrassment in private, wondering why it had not been taken down after Mukul Roy and Sovan Chatterjee had joined the BJP.

On Monday, BJP leader Rahul Sinha said: “It’s not for Trinamul to decide who would be named in the chargesheet by the CBI in this case. The investigating agency has been doing its job. It will be wrong to see any political motive behind the arrests.”