In an interim relief to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and TMC, all the four party leaders including two sitting ministers who were arrested by the CBI in the morning hours of Monday, were granted bail on Monday evening. The CBI special court had awarded bail amid protests carried out by the TMC members against the CBI for arresting the leaders. 

On Monday, two ministers Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, TMC MLA Madan Mitra, and former minister Sovan Chattopadhyay were arrested by the CBI in the Narada scam case. The CBI's action has come days after Governor Jagdeep Dhankar had permitted the Central investigative body to prosecute them in the case and all the leaders were taken to the CBI's Eastern Region headquarters in Koltaka's Nizam Palace. After knowing that the party leaders were arrested, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had rushed to the office and protested the arrests. 

She demanded the CBI to release the arrested leaders and if they fail to release them, Mamata had challenged the officials to arrest her. She told the CBI DIG Akhilesh Kumar Singh to arrest her. As the tensions grew in the office, Akhilesh Kumar Singh has alerted the CBI headquarters in Delhi after sensing a degrading law and order situation around the office. The reports say that following the alert, hundreds of police personnel were deployed to maintain law and order. 

Hundreds of TMC members had held protests across Kolkata against the CBI, Prime Minister Modi, and Home Minister Amit Shah for arresting the party leaders, which the members claim illegal. The protesters had hurled stones and water bottles at the CRPF and Kolkata police and they also had attacked the security forces. The TMC supporters had broken barriers set up before the main gate and took to sloganeering against Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the protests had turned into violence, which pushed the security forces to carry out baton charges. 

Amid the protests, the TMC party has decided to take the matter to the court. A party MP said, "We are moving to court. You know Supreme Court has made a judgment that during COVID-19 times, the police can't unnecessarily detain, arrest any person. Despite that, CBI and police have arrested four members." According to reports, the authorities had produced the arrested leaders in a special CBI court on Monday evening. 

They were produced virtually before the court and after the hearing,  the TMC leaders were granted bail by the CBI court on their personal bonds. The CBI had unfolded a high-level drama on Monday by arresting the four TMC leaders in connection with the Narada scam case. The arrests had stirred fresh tensions between the state ruling TMC and the Central ruling BJP as the development has happened when Mamata Banerjee is into a week since assuming the office of the Chief Minister of West Bengal for the third consecutive time. 

Reacting to the arrests, TMC spokesman Kunal Ghosh said that the CBI's action was a vengeful act and a fallout of the BJP's loss in the West Bengal assembly elections. He said, "The BJP is still not able to accept defeat in the polls after having made an all-out attempt to win. This is a reprehensible act." Ghosh has urged the party supporters to exercise restraint and he also sought to know why no action had been taken against Mukul Roy and Suvendu Adhikari, two leaders who have quit the TMC to join BJP as they both were also accused in the case. 

On the other hand, BJP state president Dilip Ghosh has said that both Roy and Adhikari had co-operated with the CBI probe, unlike the leaders who were arrested. He slammed the protesters for defying the lockdown norms. The TMC leaders were arrested in connection with the Narada scam. In 2014, the Narada scam had hit the national headlines when journalist Matthew Samuel had conducted a sting operation in Kolkata. In the purported sting operation video, the leaders of Trinamool Congress were videographed while receiving money in doing favours for a company. Along with the politicians, a police officer was also seen in the video.