In a morning of high drama in Kolkata, CBI teams came knocking at the doors of several Trinamool Congress leaders and within hours 3 party MLAs and a former leader were arrested in the Narada sting tape case. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and several other party leaders and supporters landed at the CBI office to protest arrests.

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Among those arrested were Trinamool MLAs Firhad Hakim, Subrata Mukherjee, Madan Mitra and former party leader Sovan Chatterjee. Hakim and Mukherjee are ministers in the recently-formed cabinet of Mamata Banerjee’s third term.

The Narada sting operation case, carried out in 2014, was made public before the 2016 assembly elections in West Bengal. The purported video showed these leaders allegedly receiving money from a representative of a make-believe entity.

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This is the second time the Chief Minister is in a showdown with the central investigating agency. In 2019, just before the Lok Sabha elections, Banerjee staged a sit-in near the Metro Channel in Kolkata over the alleged ‘mistreatment’ of then Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar by the CBI.

The showdown began after CBI officials landed at Kumar’s residence to question him in connection with the Saradha chit fund scam. Rajeev Kumar, a 1989 batch IPS officer, headed the Special Investigation Team set up by Banerjee after the scam came to light in 2013. A year later, the CBI took up the case on the Supreme Court’s order.

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The CBI officials were stopped by the Kolkata police and some of them were even taken into custody.