With its top leaders and Ministers facing the charge of being in direct and telephonic contact with con woman Saritha S Nair, the main perpetrator of the infamous solar scam, the Congress in Kerala has now embarked on a bid to diminish the significance of the case by reducing it into a problem associated with the multi-dimensional group war in the party.
The orders given by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan for probes into how call data records showing links between Saritha and Congress leaders, Ministers, their aides, senior police officials and bureaucrats had leaked two days ago are being cited as proof of this effort to shrink the case into an intra-party affair.
“My esteemed colleagues like (State Congress president) Ramesh Chennithala and Chandy, who are not even in talking terms because of the group rivalry in the party, have already declared that they would resist the anti-government campaigns in total unity. That shows how badly the recent developments have shaken them,” a group-neutral senior Congress leader said.
As per the CDRs leaked into the media, allegedly with the knowledge of the Home Minister, Saritha had been keeping telephonic contact with Congress’s seven State Ministers, two Union Ministers, an MP and several MlAs other than top leaders like Chennithala for promoting her
bogus solar power business, which was a screen for financial swindling and cheating.
However, observers point out that neither the Congress nor the UDF Government it leads will be able to bury the case easily as more and more evidences are coming out every passing day for the connections between heavyweights in the party and the government and scam perpetrators Saritha Nair and actress Shalu Menon, both of whom are behind the bars now.
It is now amply clear that Saritha Nair had misused the CM’s office with the help of Chandy’s trusted aides and that she had been in constant telephonic contact with the Home Minister almost till her arrest on June 3. likewise, it has also been established that Shalu Menon, arrested on Friday, was also enjoying
his patronage.
On Saturday, State BJP general secretary K Surendran challenged Thiruvanchoor to release the full CDRs for his own phone and that of Saritha for May 23, the day he had talked to the con woman, according to his own admission. “It was not just a 19-second call as Thiruvanchoor had claimed. There were other calls of very serious nature,” Surendran said.
“Thiruvanchoor had close connections with Saritha. He had talked with her three minutes before that missed call came… However, the Home Minister is feeling safe because of the involvement of the Chief Minister’s office in the scandal. Despite all this, the police’s interest now is in finding out how documents and CDRs are being leaked,” Surendran said.
Meanwhile, actress Shalu Menon was on Saturday remanded in judicial custody till Monday. A court in Thiruvananthapuram will consider on Monday the police’s plea for getting her in custody for questioning. Shalu, who was taken into custody from her house in Changanassery, Kottayam, was sent to the women’s prison at Attakulangara, Thiruvananthapuram.
The actress was arrested as second accused under charges of cheating, impersonation, conspiracy, etc in a case based on the complaint of one Rasiq Ali of Thiruvananthapuram that she, along with Saritha’s fraudster ex-husband Biju Radhakrishnan, had cheated him of Rs 71 lakh. Shalu would now be removed as a member of the Central Board of Film Certification.
Ends