Trinamool Congress MP Saket Gokhale on Wednesday claimed that his account with HDFC Bank was blocked in response to a news article about a case filed by the Enforcement Directorate against him two years ago.
In a post on social media platform X, the Rajya Sabha MP said that he received a call from an HDFC Bank representative, who told him that his account was blocked.
“The reason? HDFC says there was a Times of India [newspaper] report about an ED [Enforcement Directorate] case against you,” wrote Gokhale. “I said the case is 2 years old.”
The case pertains to allegations that Gokhale collected over Rs 72 lakh from more than 1,700 persons through a crowdfunding platform called “Our Democracy” and used the money for personal expenses. The Gujarat Police filed a first information report against him in December 2022, on the basis of which the Enforcement Directorate filed a case of alleged money laundering.
On August 13, the Enforcement Directorate said that a special court in Ahmedabad framed criminal charges against him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
The development was widely reported in the media.
Gokhale said on Wednesday that he asked the HDFC Bank representative if they had received orders to block his bank account. The representative told him that there were no orders but “we saw the news and blocked the account”.
The Trinamool Congress MP claimed that this was the “level of terrorism unleashed by the Enforcement Directorate” under the Narendra Modi-led Central government.
“Accounts of Opposition get frozen illegally only because there’s a ‘news article’ about a 2-year-old case,” said Gokhale. “Is randomly blocking bank accounts of the Opposition based on ‘news articles’ the new way of silencing us?”
On March 21, the Opposition Congress alleged that the Income Tax Department had frozen all its bank accounts ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.
Earlier in February too, the party said that its bank accounts had been frozen on “flimsy grounds” in connection with a tax demand dispute. It had then said that freezing the accounts of the Opposition party just before the general elections and hampering its political activities was “equivalent to freezing the democracy”.