Bangladesh moves India on Imran

India's leading Bangla daily 'Ananda Bazar Patrika' has blown the lid off the links between Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh and West Bengal's ruling Trinamool Congress.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 12 Sept 2014, 03:57 AM
Updated : 12 Sept 2014, 06:18 PM

In a front-page expose, the daily claimed Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP Ahmed Hassan Imran as the crucial link between the two parties.

"Before 2011, the Jamaat helped Trinamool with huge funds secretly transferred across the border. Imran played a key role in it.

"Later when the Jamaat faced government's ire during its opposition to war crimes trials, it received funds from Trinamool which had come to power in 2011 and many of whose leaders were ministers in the Manmohan Singh government," the Ananda Bazar Patrika report said, quoting extensively from a detailed report it claims was given to India by Bangladesh intelligence.

Indian intelligence, the report said, corroborated these claims.

Mamata Banerjee's stiff resistance to the Teesta water sharing deal and the Land Boundary Agreement is part of the ploy to destabilise the Sheikh Hasina regime, the report claimed.

"She is totally influenced by some Urdu-speaking Muslim leaders in her party who are close to Jamaat and who mobilised critical minority support and huge funds for her in the rundown to the 2011 West Bengal polls when the Left was ousted from power.

"Mamata has always tried to keep these leaders happy and her opposition to the Teesta and the Land Boundary Agreement follows her efforts to keep these leaders happy," claims the ABP report.

It says Mamata Banerjee was a minister in Indian government when the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), of which Imran was a key functionary, was banned.

It quotes BJP leader SN Singh, now in charge of the party's Bengal campaign, as saying that Mamata's nominating Imran as a Rajya Sabha candidate is a 'high act of treason'.

"Both Imran and Mamata should go to jail for what they have done. They have betrayed the nation and conspired to disrupt our good relations with a friendly neighbour," Singh was quoted by Ananda Bazar Patrika as saying.

The high pitch BJP campaign against Mamata follows the visit to Kolkata by the party's national president Amit Shah, who has advised his Bengal party colleagues to focus on Saradha scam and Mamata's Jamaat links in the rundown to some assembly by-elections in Bengal.

In fact, the ABP report claims that much of the funds that Trinamool leaders sent to Jamaat after 2011 to fund their 'violent disruptive campaign' came from Saradha coffers.