A television channel’s expose has left Abhishek Banerjee, Bengal’s second most influential politician, embarrassed for being allegedly involved in a shady deal with a tainted realtor, pushing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew into disgrace.

Abhishek is maintaining a stoic silence and his party, the Trinamool Congress which governs West Bengal, has not reacted to the charge. Worse, newspapers in Kolkata have blanked out the story from their pages. Currently, Banerjee is hospitalised in Hyderabad for an eye ailment and is said to be sulking since no Trinamool leader had stepped out to defend him in public.

While it was not immediately known if editors were intimidated by the Trinamool Congress, the editor of a Bengali daily, whose parent channel scooped the copy, did not carry it for reasons yet unspecified. A young Kolkata-based reporter of the channel which did the expose, Times Now, was interrogated by police and released after two hours.

Yet, the news spread far and wide with political observers describing the incident as the darkest moment of Banerjee’s life. Ganashakti, the party organ of the CPI(M) of the Left Front, the erstwhile governing party of the state, called the alleged scam “the true face of Abhishek Banerjee”. Kunal Ghosh, a former journalist who gained a Rajya Sabha seat from Trinamool before being hounded out in the Saradha chit fund scam, wrote on his Facebook page: “Why are journalists in Kolkata silent over the issue, why kill news?”

Interestingly, there is no case on paper, only charges pushed by the channel which had gained access to Banerjee’s payment-receipt system that showed the Diamond Harbour Lok Sabha member allegedly accepting – for his company Leaps and Bounds – a cheque worth Rs 1.5 crore from Raj Kishore Modi, a realtor who is being investigated for land grabbing and attempt to murder. On paper, the payment was shown as an investment by Modi in Banerjee’s company.

It is not sure if the payment was a commission to Banerjee or an investment into his company by Modi. The realtor was among the promoters of the expansive Vedic Village – a timeshare property on the outskirts of Kolkata – and had drawn flak from many, including Mamata Banerjee, who staged a spirited protest in 2009 demanding Modi’s arrest in connection with the same allegations of land grabbing and attempt to murder.

So the billion-dollar question bothering many in Kolkata is simple: How come Banerjee is close to a man his aunt, now the CM of the state for a second successive term, hates from the core of her heart?

The two, the channel claimed, were bound by a chartered accountant, Ashok Tulsiyan, who is both a director in Modi’s company, Green Tech City and the auditor of Leaps and Bounds. Banerjee’s address is the same as that of the CM: 30B, Harish Chatterjee Road, Kolkata.

Banerjee, a management graduate from Delhi-based Indian Institute of Planning and Marketing (IIPM) run by self-styled management guru Arindam Chaudhuri, had quit Leaps and Bounds as a director after he was elected to the Lok Sabha in the 2014 general elections. Interestingly, it was the same constituency which helped veteran Jyotirmoy Basu win parliamentary elections from 1967 to 1984.

In his meetings with party members, Banerjee would often remind them about his constituency and how it had been a Left Front stronghold. short, he wanted everyone to take him seriously. That Banerjee wielded tremendous power in the state – many called him Mamata’s Sanjay Gandhi – was known. His marriage into a family linked to former Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member KD Singh, pushed his stature to an all-time high level.

His three-storey office in Kolkata was guarded round the clock by armed police. Every morning, people waited with bated breath on the ground floor to seek permission to meet Banerjee and considered themselves lucky if Abhishek walked down to meet them. Even top officers of Kolkata Police and West Bengal Police, seasoned bureaucrats and party leaders, were made to wait, the lucky ones on the second floor next to his personal staff, for the million-dollar call. A journalist in Kolkata, who has seen Abhishek from up close, said of the 200-plus visitors, Abhishek would meet – at the most – 10. “He was being groomed by the CM. Banerjee was preparing himself for something big, he was anyway big in Bengal. He was the eyes and ears of the CM,” said the journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Banerjee had a dedicated band of followers, he singled them out whenever and wherever they followed him. They had to wear special uniform, deep blue kurtas and white trouser-shaped pyjamas. They were his Band of Brothers. His followers described Banerjee as the ideal harbinger of truth in a state where organised syndicates and their illegal cash are as commonplace as fish and football.

Banerjee was the perfect Sancho Panza to the CM, routinely reminding the firebrand leader and her government of six-and-a-half years about the earthly wisdom of Bengali proverbs, which link the rise of the rich directly in proportion to the fall of the poor. By doing so, Banerjee, president of the Trinamool youth wing, conveyed to everyone that he was clean and free from corruption that had already engulfed the state through chit fund scandals. Incidentally, his meteoric rise had to wait until Trinamool heavyweight Madan Mitra was laid low in the Saradha scam.

When Banerjee took the oath for the second time as CM at the expansive Red Road, watched by over 20,000 people in the blistering heat of May 2016, Abhishek boycotted the ceremony. His supporters plastered the city with posters that read Abhishek scored a sixer, a direct hint of the nephew’s defiance against the state government, more importantly his aunt, for including in the cabinet members, who were being probed for their involvement in the chit fund scandals. The CM, who rarely tolerates rebellion in her party’s ranks, did nothing to stop Banerjee.

In short, that was the trigger for Banerjee’s meteoric rise. He showed everyone he was different and hence, powerful. He knew the CM was backing him to the hilt. Such was her fondness for her nephew, the Bengal CM sent Manas Bhuiya to the Rajya Sabha for rushing an injured Abhishek to a top hospital in Kolkata from faraway Midnapore. Till then, Bhuiya was certainly not in the reckoning.

Expectedly, the ruling BJP-led NDA government has called press conferences in Kolkata and Delhi to praise the channel, demanding a CBI probe. The Trinamool has – more expectedly – called it a “strategic ploy of the Centre to destabilise a fully elected state government”. The CM, who looked totally furious on news TV, told reporters to keep their whirring cameras away from her because the Darjeeling impasse was an important issue to be resolved, not a “false charge on Abhishek”.

The charges and counter-charges will continue. A single charge by a news channel may not stick, unless more dirt taints Banerjee’s spotless, starched kurta. One thing is clear: The channel has added a tinge of legitimacy in what was always said about Banerjee.

It is for him to come clean, and tell visitors to his office, located at a stone throw’s from the CM’s residence, that the media is not always right. If he fails to come clean, the charge could leave a huge imprint on his career.