india

Updated: Jul 15, 2019 17:14 IST

A Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader accused of collecting ‘cut money’ on Sunday went door to door in his village in Bengal’s Bankura district returning the illegal cash he earned from different welfare schemes in the area.

Arun Gharai, a former gram panchayat member of Keshiakol village in Bankura II block, about 209 km away from Kolkata, returned about Rs 1.5 lakh to 25 villagers.

Though several ruling party leaders have returned money embezzled to the original beneficiaries, none has gone knocking on the doors like Gharai. “The villagers put pressure on me to return the money, and I obliged,” said Gharai.

“Gharai came to my house and returned Rs 5,000 in cash on Sunday. He had taken this money from me when I applied for a house under the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana in 2018,” said Maheswar Das Modak, a resident of Keshiakol. “He handed over the cash and we signed on a piece of paper acknowledging receipt,” added Modak.

Last week, several villagers went to Gharai’s house and put pressure on him to immediately return the money he took from them.

Since chief minister Mamata Banerjee urged her party leaders to return ‘cut money’, there have been agitations and even violence in different districts of the state by angry villagers demanding that the cash extorted from them be returned.

The first instance of ‘cut money’ being given back to the villagers took place in Birbhum district in the last week of June, when Trilochan Mukherjee, a local TMC leader, returned Rs 2.46 lakh to 141 villagers.

Since then a few ruling party leaders returned cash in the districts of Birbhum, Bankura and East Burdwan districts. So far, three persons have been arrested on charges of making ‘cut money’.

Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders such as Dilip Ghosh has repeatedly slammed the ruling party on the ‘cut money’ issue saying the practice of extortion, an issue raised by both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah during the Lok Sabha poll campaign, has given the state a bad name.

Trinamool secretary general Partha Chatterjee had said that the BJP was blowing up the issue and that a miniscule minority of their leaders indulged in such practices. He had also said that those who submitted to such extortions were also equally guilty as those who demanded it.