Kerala’s Congress Chief Minister Oommen Chandy is known as a leader always surrounded by people but he is now facing total isolation in the State Assembly and outside following serious allegations on his office’s links with Saritha S Nair, a woman arrested recently for large-scale money-swindling in the name of a suspicious firm promoting solar power plants.
Chandy seemed to be fighting his battle all alone in the Assembly against a ferocious Opposition which kept on demanding his resignation on Thursday and Friday as nobody from the Congress or the allies in the ruling UDF came forward to defend him. Also, leaders of the Congress and the UDF allies remained unwilling to speak for him on television talk shows on the subject.
One person who came forward to defend him on the TV was Government Chief Whip PC George, known as Chandy’s trouble-shooter, but his statements only added to his woes. George said that he had forewarned Chandy about Saritha Nair’s suspicious activities and thus giving became a fresh reason to the Opposition for pressing for the Chief Minister’s resignation.
As nobody from the Treasury benches was coming forward to support him, Chandy tried to defend himself in the Assembly on Friday by stating that George had warned him a day after Saritha was arrested and therefore the warning was of no consequence. However, the Opposition, refusing to be satisfied with this, continued to demand Chandy’s resignation.
“What is becoming apparent now is that it was the Chief Minister himself who was assisting this swindler gang. In this situation, the Chief Minister should resign and a judicial probe should be held to bring out the truth,” Deputy Opposition leader Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said. The CPI said it might launch an agitation demanding Chandy’s resignation.
On Friday, Chandy was forced to remove his personal assistant Tenny Joppen, often known as his shadow, and gunman Salim Raj after it was proved that both of them had been keeping regular telephonic contact with ‘con woman’ Saritha. In the days preceding her arrest on June 3, Saritha had talked to Joppen 71 times on the phone which Chandy also had been using.
When the issue caused pandemonium in the Assembly on Thursday, Chandy had tried to defend the two personal staff members by saying that action against them would be taken only after getting an interim report from Additional DGP A Hemachandran who was entrusted with the task of probing the allegations relating to Saritha Nair.
Within hours of the removal of Joppen and Salim Raj, reports came out that Chandy’s additional personal assistant Jikkumon Jacob, who used to accompany him outside Thiruvananthapuram, also had links with Saritha and had held conversations with her over the phone. “It is now clear that the entire Chandy administration has been part of this,” said a CPI(M) leader.
Trouble mounted for Chandy on Friday with Thomas Kuruvila, known as his ‘unofficial’ secretary stationed in Delhi, confirming that Saritha Nair had met the Chief Minister recently at high-security Vigyan Bhavan during a Chief Ministers’ conference. “She had met him but I am not sure whether there had been any conversation,” Kuruvila told a TV channel.
A court in Perumbavoor on Friday rejected Saritha’s bail plea in a case pertaining to the cheating of one Sajad of Rs40 lakh promising him to install solar power panels. Saritha, second accused in the case, and her life-partner Biju Radhakrishnan, presently absconding, are said to have taken several crores of rupees from several people in the State in this way.
It is now known that Saritha and Biju Radhakrishnan, first accused in the present case, had been using their alleged connections with the Chief Minister’s Office for their money-swindling operations. They had allegedly been using certificates written on the Chief Minister’s letterhead and bearing his signature to claim credibility to their firm.