A day after the results of Sabang Assembly constituency bypoll, the West Midnapore district superintendent of police, Bharati Ghosh, who was known for her proximity to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, was transferred to a comparatively less important and more of an ornamental post.

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In a government notification on December 25, among other officers, Ghosh, has been posted to Barrackpore as the commandant of the third battalion of state armed police. She had been replaced by Alok Rajoria.

Ghosh’s transfer after over five years of being the SP of West Midnapore and Jhargram districts has set speculations afoot especially after the convincing win of Gitarani Bhunia, wife of TMC Rajya Sabha MP Manas Bhunia, as the party MLA from Sabang. There are two theories which are doing the rounds behind the transfer of this IPS officer who had at a recent function at Jhargram referred to Mamata as ‘mother of Junglemahal’. Political analysts said that Manas had engineered the transfer of Ghosh because she had not been in his good books since he was a Congress MLA. Manas, after winning as the Congress-CPI(M) alliance candidate from Sabang in 2016, from the area had been at loggerheads with Ghosh. He had also alleged at that time that Ghosh, on the behest of the ruling dispensation, had implicated him with rape and murder charges.

Sources also said that Ghosh has been transferred because it had been observed that after the former TMC second-in-command defected to BJP, many vital party information and strategies including those ahead of Sabang by-poll, were being leaked into the opposition camp and it was suspected that Ghosh was one of those responsible. Ghosh, has, however, opted to refrain from making any comment about the transfer. Several phone calls made to her went unanswered.