TMC heavyweight, Durga Puja patron, now a person of interest for ED: Who is Bengal minister Sujit Bose?

The latest Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader under the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) radar is West Bengal Fire and Emergency Services Minister Sujit Bose. A team of ED officials on Friday searched two locations linked to Bose, a TMC heavyweight, along with premises linked to Tapas Roy, the minister for statistics and planning, and former North Dum Dum municipality chairperson Subodh Chakraborty. They are probing a municipal jobs scam case that allegedly took place across multiple civic bodies in the state between 2014 and 2018. It is alleged that “hundreds of jobs in the municipalities were given in exchange for money”.

Bose started as a student leader with the CPI(M)’s youth wing Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI). He rose to become became a close aide of CPI(M) leader Subhash Chakraborty whose writ ran in the Bidhannagar area in Kolkata’s suburbs and who was a Cabinet Minister from 1982 to 2009.

The differences between the two are said to have begun in the late 1990s and slowly Bose distanced himself from Chakraborty. In 1998, Mamata Banerjee, who by this point had emerged as a strong political force that could take on the CPI(M), resigned from the Congress and gathered her legion of supporters to form the TMC. In 2001, Bose joined the party and five years later contested his first Assembly election from the Belgachia-East constituency, taking on Chakraborty. But his one-time mentor eked out a narrow 1,749-vote win.

Subhash Chakraborty passed away in 2009 and Bose contested the subsequent bypoll against the CPI(M) veteran’s wife Ramala, defeating her by 28,360 votes to enter the Assembly for the first time. He won the subsequent Assembly elections and after the victory in 2001 was appointed minister for the first