Political cup for Didi, legal battle on... COURT AWAITS PROOF ON COP

Calcutta police commissioner Rajeev Kumar passes on a trophy to chief minister Mamata Banerjee
at the police investiture ceremony held at the Metro Channel, a road in Calcutta's Esplanade,
on Monday.  Mamata handed over the trophy to Kalyan Mukhopadhyay, deputy commissioner
of police for the South East division, which was adjudged the best among Calcutta police's
 nine divisions. This is the first time the police investiture ceremony has been held
on a road. The Bengal cabinet on Monday met at the police outpost near the Metro Channel.
Picture by Bishwarup Dutta

R. BALAJI, TT, 05 Feb 2019, New Delhi: The Supreme Court has said the CBI has not yet produced documents that suggest Calcutta police commissioner Rajeev Kumar was destroying electronic evidence in the Saradha case -- the purported reason for the overdrive by the central agency that has triggered a political crisis.

But the bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna warned that it would "come down heavily" on Kumar if the charge was later substantiated.

The court denied the CBI's plea for an immediate hearing but will take up on Tuesday the CBI's applications against the Bengal government and the police commissioner.

The CBI has sought contempt action against the Bengal government over Sunday's treatment of an agency team that had reached Kumar's residence to question him, and requested a direction to Kumar to "surrender" and "cooperate".

"We have gone through your application. There is nothing in it remotely suggesting that you have apprehensions of evidence being destroyed," Justice Gogoi told solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, appearing for the CBI, when he sought a hearing on Monday itself.

"If you had some material evidence that the commissioner of police was even remotely thinking of destroying evidence, we will come down so heavily on him, he will regret it," the bench said.

When the court referred to the content of the CBI's application, the solicitor-general said: "When we drafted the interim applications yesterday, we did not have our records. It was under the siege of the police. We got the records today (Monday) only." It was not clarified how the CBI got possession of the records overnight.

Mehta described Kumar as a "potential accused", which is at odds with the CBI's official claim that it wants to question the officer as a "witness".

On Sunday evening, Calcutta police had detained the CBI team at a police station for over an hour, and temporarily cordoned off the agency complexes in the city and Salt Lake. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee soon began an indefinite dharna against the Centre's alleged attempt to use the CBI to undermine the Constitution.

At the apex court on Monday, the CBI described the police action as "undemocratic hooliganism" that had created "an atmosphere of terror", and claimed the Constitution "has ceased to apply" in Bengal.