Kolkata, Sep 19 (IANS) Former West Bengal Education Minister and Trinamool Congress Secretary General Partha Chatterjee insisted on irregularities in school job appointments by West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) even before taking his post, the commission’s former Chairman, Chattaranjan Mondal, told a special CBI court here on Friday.

The trial process in the Central Bureau of Investigation-registered cases involving the alleged multi-crore WBSSC recruitment scam started at the special court with the recording of statements of various witnesses named in the chargesheet and supplementary chargesheets filed by the CBI in the matter.

On Friday, Mondal was presented as the first witness in the cases, and during his testimony, he made this explosive statement in court. He was the WBSSC Chairman between June 2011 and October 2013, and during that period, Chatterjee was not the state Education Minister but was the Commerce & Industries Minister.

During that period, the present Education Minister, Bratya Basu, had held the post. Mondal also said that although he was appointed as the WBSSC Chairman in 2011 for a tenure of four years, he decided to voluntarily quit after two years and six months, since he did not want to succumb to the pressure for irregular recruitments by Chatterjee and also the then Trinamool General Secretary and Rajya Sabha member, Mukul Roy.

However, Mondal clearly said that Basu had never put such unethical pressure on him during his period as the WBSSC Chairman then.

Thereafter, Chatterjee’s counsel questioned Mondal on whether the latter was a member of the manifesto committee of any particular political party at a later stage.

To that question, Mondal replied that he joined the BJP before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, like many, and he became a member of the party’s manifesto committee for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

However, he denied having given any statement to the CBI in the school-job case during his tenure or as a BJP leader, and there was no indirect or direct pressure on him from any quarter to give any statement on any line in the matter.

The process of recording the statements of the witnesses in the cases will continue on Saturday, as well as on Monday. After the process of recording the statements of the witnesses in the cases is over, the process of arguments and counter-arguments in the cases by the counsels of different parties will start.

–IANS

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