Kolkata: The city police on Saturday arrested West Bengal BJP leader Ranajit Majumdar for his alleged involvement in the multi-crore LPG distributorship scam in which many BJP workers were duped by promising them gas agencies.The Wire was the first to report on this story and outline the contours of the racket on June 26, 2018. The report at the time described Majumdar as the point man in this scheme, who then was the West Bengal convenor for the ‘Good Governance Cell’ of the Union government. The issue started with BJP party workers complaining of being duped by top district and state leaders who promised them distributorships of LPG (liquid petroleum gas) in exchange of bribes. Some of the complaints were against state BJP leaders and officials who are allegedly close to oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan.Majumdar, in his Facebook page – quite illegally – was also allegedly asking people to approach him for the prime minister’s housing project for the poor. He allegedly mopped up huge funds this way.West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, in her speech on Martyrs’ Day on July 21, made a reference to the LPG scam and ordered the police to probe into it. The Kolkata police set up a special investigation team (SIT) under the leadership of joint commissioner crime Praveen Tripathi.According to an SIT official, “We found from the documents submitted by Siva Sena general secretary Ashok Sarkar who had lodged a police complaint about this scam and named several state BJP leaders including the state BJP president Dilip Ghosh who is also an MLA.”“The documents had several e-mails exchanged between BJP leaders and Ranajit and also a list which he had given to Union petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan during his visit to New Delhi. Ranajit told us that the list was signed by Dilip Ghosh on his personal letterhead and contained names of 235 BJP workers who were to be allotted LPG distributorships in Bengal,” the official said.Dilip Ghosh. Credit: FacebookCopies of the Excel sheet and e-mails are in possession of The Wire. The e-mails detail how a list of places where LPG agencies would be given was sent to the BJP state office nearly six months before the public advertisements for the same were issued in March 2018.Majumdar was first summoned by the SIT on September 4 and interrogated and then twice later before his arrest on Saturday. He was produced in the city Bankshall Court and remanded to police custody till September 20.BJP state president Dilip Ghosh reacted saying, “The police tried to force Ranajit to name some of our leaders and had gone to Murshidabad and picked up two of our district leaders. We know how to counter this Trinamool Congress conspiracy and people will give a fitting reply during the Lok Sabha polls next year. There has been no scam at all and the TMC is trying to use the police to create one.”However, in June, Ghosh had admitted to receiving complaints about the racket from a number of district BJP leaders and later said, “Ranajit has been removed from his post because of his involvement in the scam.”While Ghosh on Saturday admitted that Majumdar was a BJP leader, state general secretary Sayantan Basu, who also allegedly is a beneficiary of the scam, remarked, “Out party is not involved in any scam as we have nothing to do with Ranajit who had been removed from the post long ago.”According to SIT officials, more heads are likely to be in the dock in the near future as Majumdar has named several BJP and RSS leaders who were beneficiaries of the scam, amounting to several crores of rupees. On Majumdar’s tip-off, the SIT also arrested Bidhan Sarkar, BJP mandal president in Murshidabad district, and one of his associates.This is not the first arrest by the police of a BJP worker linked to the scam. After The Wire’s report in June was published, a worker claiming to a “disciple of Dilip Ghosh and state general secretary Raju Banerjee” threatened this correspondent and demanded Rs 2 lakh as compensation. The BJP worker, Subhankar Bose also threatened a woman BJP leader Debolina Shastri who he thought had revealed information about this scam. The Bidhannagar City Police registered a criminal case and Bose was arrested on July 26 and sent to jail after spending five days in police custody. Bose too during interrogation reportedly named Raju Banerjee at whose behest he had acted, the police said.One SIT official, who declined to be identified, said that Majumdar, among others, had named Dilip Ghosh under whose instructions he had sent e-mails to all district presidents to suggest names of party workers who were interested in getting LPG distributorships and paid Rs 5-10 lakhs each. E-mails were also allegedly sent to Bidyut Mukherjee, RSS prantha pracharak of south Bengal, and state general secretaries Subrata Chatterjee, Sayantan Basu and Raju Banerjee.“One by one we will summon all those whom Ranajit has named and if need be obtain court orders to summon the petroleum companies’ bosses and also officers in the ministry in Delhi as the network seem to be pan India,” the official said.Sayantan had earlier admitted that he knew Pradhan and had said, “I know the minister since my college days and discuss several things but never about allotting petrol pumps or gas agencies.”Sayantan, whose wife works as a commercial tax officer in the West Bengal government, is also known to be close to the ruling Trinamool Congress. “People do approach me for jobs or about problems they faced with the government but then I had always referred it to Ranajit,” he had remarked.Arup Chanda is a senior journalist based in Kolkata.