Nirmala Sitharaman rebuts Opposition on charges of misuse of Central agencies

Counters that West Bengal Government is deploying State Police to harass political foes

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has dismissed Opposition parties’ charges that the Central government is deploying investigative agencies like the Enforcement Directorate to put pressure on them, calling such allegations ‘baseless’ and ‘impossible’.

That such charges were levied “openly” after meetings between Opposition-ruled States’ leaders such as K. Chandrasekhar Rao, Uddhav Thackeray and Mamata Banerjee, was in itself a signal that no such pressure was put, the Minister pointed out.

“Suppose even for a minute, I am not saying it is true, but if we were using investigating agencies to pressurise the Opposition… all three of these have met and have given statements out in the open. So what was the effect of this pressure? There is no pressure being put,” she pointed out.

“You want to meet… everybody has the right to meet each other in a democracy and build up an alliance. But don’t talk about pressure. If you are still talking while claiming to be under pressure, what does it mean? It’s a baseless allegation, I will say it repeatedly,” Ms. Sitharaman said, before taking on the West Bengal government for similarly deploying the State police against local Opposition workers.

“I will like to remind you what’s happening in Bengal in this same context. Those using the State police to harass every karyakarta, that government should not level such baseless allegations against others,” she asserted.

The Minister also said it was impossible for the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to act against anyone at will, even if it wished to do something ‘for political or any other reason’, without having substantial material evidence and doing a lot of groundwork.

“The ED, mind you, cannot jump in first. It is a law enforcement agency that deals with predicate offence, which means there is an offence somewhere that has been acted upon, post-that there is an offence created that is under the realm of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and then the ED goes in. It cannot enter anywhere,” she noted.