Cal HC delivers split verdict on bail plea to Partha Chatterjee, 4 others

A two-judge division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Wednesday delivered a split verdict on a bail petition moved by former West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee and four other high-profile accused, indicted by the CBI in the School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment scam.

While Justice Arijit Banerjee approved the bail of all the 10 accused who appealed before the bench, Justice Apurba Sinha Roy decided against granting bail to Chatterjee and four other former education department officials Subiresh Bhattacharya, Ashok Saha, Kalyanmoy Gangopadhyay and Shanti Prasad Sinha.

Bhattacharya served as the erstwhile state SSC chairman and, subsequently, as vice-chancellor of North Bengal University, while Saha acted as the former assistant secretary to the commission during the time period of the scam.

 

Gangopadhyay was president of the state secondary education board during the period, and Sinha is the former advisor to the state SSC.

The corruption, which has run into several hundred crores and adversely affected the career of thousands of school job aspirants in Bengal, reportedly exposed a host of people in the power corridors of the state's education sector who were directly involved in manipulation of marks, destruction and tampering of OMR sheets, and appointments in lieu of money.

Both judges, however, agreed on granting bail to five other suspects in the case  Kaushik Ghosh, Subrata Samanta Roy alias Babu, Sk Ali Imam, Sk Shahid Imam and Chandan Mondal alias Ranjan. All five were slapped with charges of acting as agents and middlemen for collecting money from undeserving candidates in the cash-for-jobs scam.

The cases involving the five accused where the court failed to reach a unanimous verdict, according to senior lawyers of the court, would now be transferred to Chief Justice T S Sivagnanam who would, in turn, assign a third bench to take a conclusive decision.

While Justice Banerjee highlighted the long custodial detention of the accused and drew attention to the inordinate delay in the trial proceedings to start as basis for his granting of bail to the accused, Justice Sinha Roy stressed on the influential status of the applicants in deciding to not grant them bail.

Both judges took note of the fact that the state government was yet to provide the mandatory sanction for prosecuting the five high-profile accused, without which their trial proceedings were unlikely to proceed.

Justice Sinha Roy directed the state to decide the issue of sanction within a fortnight and in default, the state shall be deemed to have sanctioned the prosecution in respect of the applicants as prayed for by the CBI, and the trial court shall proceed with the case in accordance with law, and further neither the state nor the applicants at any stage of the subsequent proceedings can take the plea of deficiency in process of sanction.

Chatterjee was arrested on July 23, 2022 by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with the scam, and later by the CBI. The four senior officials were subsequently arrested by the CBI in the same case.

A former TMC leader, Chatterjee is lodged in jail for more than two years now and has moved bail applications both before the high court and the Supreme Court on multiple occasions in the past. His applications were rejected by the court's single bench and division benches.

Chatterjee had also moved a bail application in cases registered against him by the ED. The bench of Justice Tirthankar Ghosh of the Calcutta High Court had also dismissed that prayer following the conclusion of the hearing in April this year.

Following Chatterjee's arrest in 2022, the ED recovered a staggering amount of around Rs 50 crore in cash and gold ornaments and foreign currencies from two Kolkata apartments owned by his close associate' Arpita Muhkerjee. Mukherjee is currently lodged in the Presidency Correctional Home.