Kolkata: Former North Bengal Development minister Udayan Guha on Wednesday became the fourth Trinamool Congress minister to be arrested since the change of govt in Bengal.Dinhata and Kolkata cops along with central force personnel raided Guha’s flat in a housing complex in Kankurgachhi and took him into custody in a 10-year-old cheating case. He was then escorted back to north Bengal.Earlier, former ministers Sujit Bose (fire), Ujjwal Biswas (correctional home) and Dilip Mondal (MoS, transport) were arrested on charges of corruption. Cops said Guha was arrested on a complaint filed in June 11, 2016 by Gopal Saha, husband of Guha’s domestic help Gopa and a resident of ward 11 in Dinhata, who alleged that the former minister, then chairman of Dinhata municipality, took Rs 43,000 from him to get them a house under PM Awas Yojana.Guha claimed he was innocent. “I am being targeted. I am not a criminal and I have never cheated anyone,” he said while leaving an eatery in Krishnanagar where the police team stopped for lunch on way to Dinhata. Trinamool MP Saugata Roy claimed the arrest was a “vindictive move” the BJP govt.Ever since his loss to BJP’s Ajay Roy from Dinhata, Guha had been living in Kolkata and was not seen in public.On Wednesday, Dinhata cops first reached Guha’s New Town address but finding him absent there approached Phoolbagan police station and together raided Guha’s flat at Parvati Residency in Kankurgachhi around noon. A senior resident of the complex said Guha had bought the flat 15 years ago and had been living here with his family for the past month.current North Bengal Development minister Nisith Pramanik said this was “just the beginning” and all his aides will also be in the net soon. “The man who did not allow common people of Dinhata to live in peace, who made their lives miserable, who subjected them to unspeakable oppression, that person is Udayan Guha. That tiger has today become a cat, confined in a cage,“ Pramanik said.Sources said there were several other complaints against the former minister, including those linked to post-poll violence, intimidation and corruption. On June 11, one Rupam Saha filed a complaint at Dinhata police station accusing Guha of making crores in the name of setting up a modern paediatric unit (Sishu Mangal Samity) at Dinhata Subdivisional Hospital that never saw the light of day.“I had earlier tried to lodge a complaint against Guha but his party was in office and he was a minister. He used his connections to make sure the complaint was never filed,” Rupam said.Guha, son of former Left Front minister Kamal Guha, had joined Trinamool in Oct 2015. He had won the Dinhata assembly seat in 2011 on a Froward Bloc ticket and again in 2016 as a Trinamool candidate. He lost to BJP’s Pramanik in the 2021 assembly polls but after Pramanik resigned to contest the Lok Sabha polls, Guha won the bypoll by a huge margin.
