Trinamool leader demanded Rs.4 crore from Saradha boss: MP

Rebel Trinamool Congress MP Kunal Ghosh Monday targeted two West Bengal ministers by name as he intensified his attack on the Mamata Banerjee-led state government and the ruling party.

Apparently cut up with the Trinamool leadership for the fresh police grillings that he was subjected to Saturday and Sunday in connection with the Saradha Group chit fund scam, the journalist-turned-Rajya Sabha member also alleged that a Trinamool leader demanding his resignation on the scam had in the past asked for Rs.4 crore from Saradha boss Sudipta Sen.

Ghosh did not name the leader, and said Sen had confided in him about the transaction.

"I hear one person time and again asking for my resignation. Sudipta Sen had told me once that this leader had demanded Rs.4 crore from him," said Ghosh.

Naming a minister, Ghosh said he was threatening the persons who funded a newly-launched newspaper with which the MP was involved.

"After my political speech (on Friday, when he lashed out against the party leadership), the member of the council of ministers (name of the minister) is threatening the financer of a daily with which I am associated, to close down the newspaper.

"On the one hand, we are publicly expressing our sympathies for journalists, and on the other hand we are doing all this, to shut down a paper, with which so many journalists are involved.

"If such things don't stop, I'll sit on fast-unto-death in front of the residences of such ministers and leaders," he said.

Turning the gun on another senior minister, who was a top bureaucrat during the erstwhile Left Front government, Ghosh alleged that he was responsible for ordering the firing on Congress activists on July 21, 1993, during a Writers' Buildings (state secretariat) blockade agitation. Thirteen people were killed in the firing.

The day is observed as martyrs' day by both the Congress and the Trinamool, whose supreme Banerjee was a Congress leader during the incident.

On Saturday, after four hours of questioning, Ghosh alleged a "conspiracy" had been hatched against him.

After the second round of interrogation Sunday, Ghosh virtually threatened his party saying he was not "revealing things for the sake of courtesy" and demanded the constitution of a party panel on the issue, as "I don't want to make public, things relating to the party".

Ghosh warned that he would seek permission to address the media if he was arrested.

He has also demanded a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the Saradha case.