Saradha scam with Trinamool links may also have funded Bangla Islamists

The Saradha scam, the now-gone-bust Ponzi scheme run by a group with strong linkages with important Trinamool Congress (TMC) politicians, appears to have a Bangladeshi Islamic fundamentalist connection, too.

According to a recent report in T he New Indian Express, a good chunk of the Saradha money was clandestinely shipped over to Bangladesh to fund the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JIB), which was waging a violent campaign against the pro-India Awami League government of Sheikh Hasina. Several leaders of the JIB have been accused of war crimes in connection with the 1971 Bangladesh liberation struggle, and the street protests were organised to intimidate the courts after they gave awarded some death sentences.

The New Indian Express report says that funds collected by the Saradha schemes, which went bust around mid-2013, were transported to centres close to the Bangladesh border by Saradha ambulances, illegally converted to Bangladesh taka and European currencies by a Kolkata-based (hawala) trader, and finally carted in the last leg of the journey by “armed couriers of radical Islamic outfits.”

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The report, sourced anonymously to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate, says the investigations unearthed this information whole looking at the money trail in the Saradha scam. A Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP, said to be Ahmad Hassan Imran, is alleged to have been a key player in this routing of investor cash to Bangladeshi fundamentalists.

Hassan himself has had links to the banned Islamic fundamentalist Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi). He was interrogated by the Enforcement Directorate for over seven hours recently in connection with the Saradha scam.

The links between the Saradha scam, Trinamool politicians and fundamentalist politics - both in West Bengal and Bangladesh - are currently tenuous, but the pieces are beginning to fit. The scam left lakhs on small investors in eastern India, from Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and Assam high and dry.

The Saradha Group, run by Managing Director and kingpin Sudipto Sen (now in jail), has had several Trinamool names associated with it. Trinamool MP Kunal Ghosh was a salaried employee, and Bengal Transport Minister Madan Mitra has been seen publicly endorsing Saradha’s schemes. Sudipto Sen himself is said to have paid Rs 1.86 crore to buy paintings by Mamata Banerjee - a point Narendra Modi taunted Mamata with during the Lok Sabha campaign - and Banerjee was there at the inaugural of Kalom (Pen) newspaper, run by Hassan.

Kalom started out as a fortnightly under Ahmed Hassan - our ex-Simi Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP - and later became a daily when it was bought over by the Saradha group in 2011. But when the Saradha group went bust in April 2013, Kalam seems to have mysteriously regained control of it and restarted publication - even though the rest of the group’s publications struggled. The ED is wondering what Sudipto Sen paid Hassan for the 2011 acquisition, and where this cash went.

As this Business Standard story notes, some of Saradha’s brochures carried Mamata Banerjee’s pictures, and when Sen launched a publication called _Sakalbela, “_Banerjee sent a message that said: ‘We will have to pass the dark night to begin our journey in the light of dawn.’ Incidentally, when Banerjee issued a diktat on the newspapers public libraries should stock, Saradha’s Sakalbela found a place on the list.”

A Times of India report says the loss-making Landmark Cement Company, owned by the family of a Trinamool MLA from Bankura, was bought by Saradha at a huge premium to its intrinsic value.

Clearly, at least at the level of public perceptions, Saradha and Trinamool appear to have been joined at the hip, and this quote from a former Saradha agent Abradeep sums it up best: “We believed this group would never fail so long as Trinamool Congress was in power,” Abradeep told Business Standard.

If Trinamool politicians have much to answer for in the Saradha scam and subsequent bust, the other equation that still remains unsolved is the group’s alleged funnelling of cash across the Bangladesh border to the fundamentalist Jammat-e-Islami Bangladesh (JIB).

A whiff of this linkage surfaced during the Lok Sabha campaign, when CPI(M) Central Committee member Gautam Deb accused Ahmad Hassan Imran of being a “frontman” for JIB. Apart from accusing him of earlier links to Simi, Deb also said that Hassan had “developed close association” with important JIB leaders of Bangladesh," including “Motiur Rehman Nizami (chief of JIB, charged with war crimes by the War Crimes Tribunal), Delwar Hossain Sayeedi (deputy head of JIB, sentenced to death by the tribunal), Mir Kasem Ali (JIB associate) and others,” The Hindu reported in May 2014.

The political implications of Hassan’s Bangladeshi linkages, and his alleged role in helping send cash across to fundamentalists across the border, has huge political implications.

First, it is a well-known fact that Trinamool’s big win in May 2014 was the result of a huge consolidation in the Muslim vote behind her - aided and abetted by mosque and imam. Imam NR Barkati of Kolkata's Tipu Sultan Mosque has often bragged that he put Mamata in power.

Second, a chunk of the Muslim vote is widely acknowledged to be the illegal immigrant Bangladeshi Muslim vote. In large parts of West Bengal’s border districts, the immigrant vote is decisive in political outcomes - leading to a counter-polarisation. The BJP was a small beneficiary of this trend in the Lok Sabha polls, and expects to make bigger gains in future, and especially in the 2016 state assembly polls.

Third, Mamata Banerjee blocked the India-Bangladesh treaty on Teesta waters in 2011 - a deal that would have strengthened Sheikh Hasina politically. The failure of that deal weakened this all-important pro-India Bangladeshi leader; the Mamata veto thus indirectly strengthened anti-India forces.

While no one can say that Banerjee deliberately scuttled the deal to help the anti-India forces, the fact that there are strong links between some of her party MPs like Hassan and anti-India forces in Bangladeshi, who, in turn, may also have been funded by the Saradha group, will need some explanation.

The three-way linkage between Saradha, Trinamool politics and Bangladeshi Islamists needs closer examination.