A palpable sense of anti-climax seemed to pervade Kerala’s political sphere on Thursday, with the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) apparently executing a “last-minute flip flop” on its “earlier resolve” to spotlight a Kochi-based mining company’s alleged backhanders to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s daughter and IT entrepreneur T. Veena Vijayan in the Assembly on Thursday.
The UDF’s “dread” that the scandal would prove double-edged seemed to have stayed the Opposition’s hand.
Congress “belatedly learned” that the IT department filings before an adjudication board in New Delhi also revealed sizeable handouts to UDF leaders and mediapersons, ostensibly to mute their objections to the company’s “environmentally hazardous” black sand-mining operations in Kerala, during the 2016-20 period.
