Kolkata woke up to an extremely cold morning on Thursday, with the temperature plummeting to 11 degrees Celsius, quite unusual in terms of the winter experienced by the city. However, the chill was soon broken by an early morning raid by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which considerably heated up the political environment of West Bengal.
On Thursday, the ED started raiding the residence of political consultant agency I-PAC’s co-founder Pratik Jain’s Loudon Street residence. The central agency was raiding I-PAC’s Salt Lake office as well, simultaneously.
What began as a routine raid, soon spiraled into a whirlwind of political storm, as West Bengal’s Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, barged into Jain’s residence with the Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Verma by her side. Banerjee’s operation lasted merely few minutes, and by the time she reemerged from Jain’s residence, she was seen holding a bunch of plastic files and folders, with a distinguishable green file sitting on the top of the pile.
The Raids
To put things in perspective, after the debacle of the 2019 General Elections in West Bengal, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to score 18 seats out of the state’s 42, Trinamool Congress’ (TMC) top leader Abhishek Banerjee hired I-PAC to turn the tide in his party’s favour. I-PAC is still employed by West Bengal’s ruling party.
After her brief escapade, Mamata Banerjee addressed the press, standing right in front of Jain’s residence, launching a scathing attack on the BJP.
“The entire ED raid is politically motivated. As I-PAC monitors TMC’s organisational activity and prepares the candidate list, and they have quite an amount of sensitive information about our party, BJP tried to get hold of those documents through ED”.Mamata Banerjee
From Loudon street, Mamata Banerjee went to I-PAC’s Salt Lake office. Her presence created another spectacle there as well. While she was there, a group of well-built men were seen barging into the 12-storied building and within minutes they returned with stacks of files, folders and laptops, which they emptied onto the back of a waiting car, purportedly belonging to the chief minister.
According to sources, these men were police personnel in civil clothes, who ‘rescued’ sensitive information from the ‘clutches’ of the ED, acting on the instructions of the chief minister.
This whole fiasco unfolded while the ED raid was ongoing. According to ED sources, the agency raided Jain’s residence and I-PAC’s Salt Lake office in connection to the coal smuggling scam. The agency claimed through a social media post, that on 8 January, they raided 10 locations across West Bengal and Delhi in connection to the coal smuggling and associated money laundering case, and it had got nothing to do with any political party or elections.
Countering this claim, TMC’s Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee told The Quint:
“Every time before the elections, the central agencies become hyperactive. This is an old script. BJP has failed time and again to garner popular support in Bengal, so they are using agencies to throttle us. But it won’t work. BJP is using the E^2 strategy. ED for Opposition and ECI for voters. We will combat it with M^3, where the three M’s stand for Maa, Mati and Manush”.
Didi Holds the Fort
Starting from 12 pm, the tug of war between Mamata Banerjee and ED continued till 4:30 pm in the evening, and quite naturally created a political controversy.
Mamata Banerjee targeted BJP from Salt Lake as well, calling Home Minister Amit Shah ‘naughty’ and ‘nasty’, stating, “The Home minister cannot protect the country, but he is sending agencies to steal our information. I urge the Prime Minister to intervene. Will it be nice for the BJP if we start raiding their offices in the state as well?"
According to Banerjee, Jain is her party’s in-charge, and so she had to intervene to save her party’s sensitive documents.
While Mamata Banerjee held fort at Salt Lake, ED officials approached Justice Suvra Ghosh’s bench of Kolkata High Court on Thursday, seeking permission to lodge a case against her.
The agency’s legal representatives sought intervention, claiming the chief minister had interfered with ongoing investigations and absconded with sensitive pieces of evidence. I-PAC and TMC also followed suit, seeking permission to file a counter-case against the ED, claiming that this raid was politically motivated.
Both the appeals were up for hearing on Friday. However, Justice Ghosh was forced to adjourn the court as the courtroom remained overcrowded, despite several appeals. Both TMC and BJP mobilised their lawyer corps and flocked into the courtroom, forcing the judge to adjourn the case till 14 January.
Along with fighting the legal battle, TMC held a rally in Kolkata, starting from Jadavpur 8B to Hazra crossing. Addressing the gathering, Mamata Banerjee once again cleared her stance that she had done nothing wrong. “I fought to protect my party. Yesterday’s raid was illegal, and politically motivated. I went there not as a chief minister, but as the chairperson of TMC”, said Banerjee.
Political Tug of War
Although this tug of war is principally centered around TMC and BJP, the state unit of CPI(M) was the first Opposition party to respond.
CPI(M) state secretary MD Salim held a press conference on Thursday, and reiterated their longstanding stance of ‘setting’ between the central government and the state government to divide the state polity among themselves.
“As per standard operating procedure, any investigative agency cordons off the space where they are raiding or investigating. So how was the chief minister allowed to infiltrate into that zone? Why was no immediate action taken against her? It seemed that the ED offered her safe passage and allowed her to take away whatever documents she wanted”.MD Salim
“We have information that Pratik Jain is just a face. The real ownership of I-PAC lies with Abhishek Banerjee. That’s why Mamata Banerjee became so desperate and went in herself”, Salim told The Quint.
Incidentally, Abhishek Banerjee’s name had surfaced quite frequently in the ongoing coal smuggling and the money laundering case associated with it. Central agencies such as the ED and CBI had questioned Banerjee a few times, though nothing substantial has come out of those grillings till now.
Speaking about the issue, TMC’s Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee said to The Quint:
"Perhaps gauging that ED’s failure to stop Mamata Banerjee had ridiculed the agency’s image in public eye, which bolstered the ‘setting’ theory, the BJP was cautious while reacting."Ritabrata Banerjee
Both Shamik Bhattacharya, the state BJP President and Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of Opposition of West Bengal slammed Mamata Banerjee for doing a seemingly ‘illegal job’, rather than focusing on the impact of her activities on the outcome of investigations.
Bhattacharya said, “Whatever Mamata Banerjee did on Thursday is unprecedented in Indian politics”. But he avoided any comment on whether this action had any impact on the ongoing investigation. While facing journalists on Thursday, he said:
“I don’t know whether the chief minister was able to derail the investigations. You should ask ED officials about it. We don’t know what exactly she did inside, but whatever she did is clearly criminal in nature”.
According to sources within the BJP, the chief minister tried to create a spectacle by going inside and collecting all those files. She is desperately trying to rally her forces. If she really had to retrieve any sensitive information, the process was bound to be discrete.
The BJP’s National President JP Nadda was also present in Kolkata while this fiasco was unfolding. He too avoided any statement regarding this issue.
The BJP's strategic silence has seemingly helped the party navigate the situation smartly, as can be seen by the public mood on social media, which is decidedly anti-ED. One after another Bengali content creator, with seemingly no political ties, have been slamming the ED's apparent helplessness and failure to stop Mamata Banerjee. Corrolaries have also been drawn from pre-poll ED raids in other states. The videos and reels not only garnered views in thousands, the comment section too reflected the same feeling, cementing the 'Bije-mool' narrative of the Left, which alleged a tacit understanding between the Centre and the state.
Whatever might be the legal outcome of this spectacle, Mamata Banerjee’s ‘showmanship’, right at the doorstep of the 2026 Assembly polls, has far-reaching ramifications across India.
Whether the raids become a political boon or bane for the Opposition ahead of the upcoming elections in West Bengal is yet to be seen. But no matter how staunchly the Left may try to cling onto the narrative of a secret ‘setting’ between the central BJP and TMC, enabling Banerjee to move scot free while challenging the ED, her ‘daring’ enterprise and the public spectacle of popular support (as seen in her star-studded rally a day after the raids) has definitely earned her another round of laurels for cementing her national image as the unflinching crusader against the BJP-led central government and its apparatus.
A politician who naturally thrives in the Opposition role, this renewed image will definitely help Didi and her party navigate the murky waters of the upcoming crucial election.
(Anindya Hazra is an independent journalist reporting on news and politics from Kolkata.)