The Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continued to assail the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government for the second consecutive day on Wednesday for its alleged silence in the face of accusations of financial impropriety against Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the police were pussyfooting around the complaint given by Benny Behnan, MP, to the State Police Chief (SPC) seeking an investigation into the accusations of financial misdemeanour raised by G. Sakthidharan, former associate editor of Deshabhimani, against Mr. Vijayan.
In a Facebook post, Mr. Sakthidharan stated he had helped a top “CPI(M) leader enumerate ₹2.5 crore at the Deshabhimani’s office in early 2000.
He had claimed he witnessed another CPI(M) leader, currently a Cabinet minister, cart the money tucked in a hand-woven sleeping mat in a car bound for Thiruvananthapuram.
Mr. Sakthidharan did not name the CPI(M) leaders involved in the purported episode. However, the Congress and the BJP pointed their fingers at Mr. Vijayan.
Mr. Chennithala said the SPC passed on the complaint to the ADGP, Law and Order, without ordering the registration of an FIR. “It smacked of a cover-up at the highest level of law enforcement,” he said.
Union Minister of State for External Affairs V. Muraleedharan said Mr. Sakthidharan’s accusation pointed to the entrenched mafia-style corruption in the CPI(M) ‘s top echelons. He said the former journalist’s accusations warranted a criminal inquiry.
Leaning his case on a controversial report published by a Bengaluru-based online media outlet, BJP State president K. Surendran trained the gun on Mr. Vijayan.
He alleged that Mr. Vijayan rendered paddy land reclamation laws toothless to enable an NRI businessperson and “CPI(M) associate”, whom he identified as Pharis Aboobacker, pull off lucrative real estate deals pegged at ₹1,500 crores. Mr. Surendran dared Mr. Vijayan to sue the media outlet if the report was false.
KPCC president K. Sudhakaran said the BJP and the CPI(M) were in cahoots to undermine Congress in Kerala with an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
“For one, the ED has not booked Mr. Vijayan in the LIFE Mission graft-related money laundering case despite overwhelming evidence. I will implead in the case against Mr. Vijayan when it comes up for trial,” he said.
The CPI(M) has not responded to the accusations. However, some in the party felt the latest “recriminatory campaign” against Mr. Vijayan seemed calibrated to give some propaganda cover to BJP and Congress leaders who are targets of various police investigations.
