Kolkata & Krishnanagar, June 23: In a dramatic escalation of the ongoing crackdown against political corruption in West Bengal, the Bidhannagar City Police have slapped additional charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act against heavyweight Trinamool Congress leader and former Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Mayor, Sabyasachi Dutta. The legal breakthrough came following back-to-back midnight raids and locker searches that unspooled a multi-crore trail of gold jewelry and bullion, evoking stark parallels to the state’s infamous 2022 cash-for-jobs scam and heavily shifting the political narrative against the ruling dispensation.
Acting on specific leads extracted during Dutta’s custodial interrogation, a joint police team executed a high-stakes, midnight raid on Monday at the Nadia district residence of Tina Bhowmick Saha. Saha, a prominent two-term Trinamool Congress Zilla Parishad member from the Tehatta Assembly constituency, has been identified by investigators as a close political aide who developed tight ties with Dutta ahead of the 2021 Assembly elections. Strikingly, investigators brought an arrested Dutta along to witness the search operation at Saha’s paternal home in Karimpur, which yielded 3 kg of gold jewelry. Hours later on Tuesday, a parallel search of Dutta’s personal bank locker in Salt Lake saw another 3 kg of gold ornaments and biscuits tumble out.
Tina
In total, the single-day haul stood at 6 kg of gold and 1.3 kg of silver coins, with a total estimated street value exceeding Rupees 4 crore. Special Public Prosecutor Bivas Chatterjee confirmed the shifting legal gravity of the case on Tuesday evening, noting that while the accused was initially charged only with extorting money from a local businessman, the recovery of substantial gold assets has brought additional charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act, meaning the case will now be shifted to a designated special court equipped to try corruption allegations against public representatives.
While Dutta has consistently maintained his innocence, claiming political vendetta, police investigators present a far more systematized picture, suspecting that the recovered gold represents the direct physical conversion of “extortion money” collected by the former mayor. The scale of the asset accumulation appears massive, as detectives had already recovered purchase receipts for an astonishing 76 kg of gold jewelry from Dutta’s residential apartments during earlier sweeps. Law enforcement is currently in the process of tallying the newly seized jewelry with those historic receipts to map out the entire financial web.
The development has sent shockwaves through Bengal’s political corridors, immediately drawing fierce criticism from the opposition who have linked this to past structural scandals. Speaking on the floor of the House, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari capitalized on the news, comparing the situation directly to the 2022 Enforcement Directorate raids where over ₹50 crore in cash and several kilograms of gold were recovered from Arpita Mukherjee, an associate of the then-imprisoned Education Minister Partha Chatterjee.
While Tina Bhowmick Saha has not been formally charged yet and remains unavailable for comment despite repeated police attempts to contact her, senior officials of the Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate confirmed they are in the process of examining her involvement. Dutta’s initial 14-day police remand concluded on Tuesday, and following a brief presentation before the magistrate, he was remanded to a day’s judicial custody ahead of his scheduled appearance before the Special Anti-Corruption Court on Wednesday.