A scandal has erupted in Kerala over the allegation of tapping by the police of the phone of G Sukumaran Nair, general secretary of the Nair Service Society (NSS), outfit of the Hindu upper caste Nairs, which has declared war on the Congress-led UDF Government for its alleged anti-majorities posture and policy of appeasing the minority communities.
The allegation has turned out to be a huge embarrassment for the two-year-old UDF Government which is already in a deep crisis following the escalation of faction war in the Congress and the resultant standoff between State Congress president Ramesh Chennithala and Chief Minister Oommen Chandy over a move for a difficult Cabinet reshuffle.
Nair said at the NSS headquarters in Perunna in Kottayam district that he had lodged complaints with Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan over the matter but had received no explanation from them so far. He said he had received the information about the phone-tapping from reliable sources in the State police.
Thiruvanchoor claimed that no move to tap the phone of Sukumaran Nair or any other community leader had ever been made by the police but this denial failed to pacify Nair or the NSS. With criticism mounting against the Government over the allegation, the Minister was forced to order a probe by Inspector General (Central) K Padmakumar into the matter.
The Opposition lDF, which termed tapping of Nair’s phone as illegal, wanted Chandy to offer an explanation on the matter. Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, deputy Opposition leader in the Assembly wanted a judicial probe into the allegation while State CPI secretary Pannyan Raveendran said the phone-tapping was condemnable if it was done with the Chief Minister’s knowledge.
Nair said that the police could have decided to tap his phone to get information on the plans of the NSS, which had been in friendly relation with the Congress and the UDF till over a year ago, in the context of its anti-Government stand. He said the NSS would think of the course of action to be taken later.
“The phone-tapping has been going on for the past some days. I complained directly to the Home Minister (himself a Nair who was a close friend of the NSS leadership till recently). But what he did was to try to teach me about the situation under which the police used to tap phones. However, tapping continued even after that,” Nair said.
“This is a disgusting practice. It is wrong to view leaders of community organisations that have been serving the society for the past hundred years as criminals. The Government does not have the right to sneak into anybody’s privacy,” he added.
Despite the Government’s total denial of the allegation, the public perception is that the Home Department could indulge in such practices considering the headaches the new NSS posture is causing to the Congress and UDF. Even the current crisis in the Congress had its origin in the Government’s efforts to pacify the NSS by inducting Chennithala, a Nair, into the Cabinet.
Meanwhile, reports said that the information about the phone-tapping was conveyed to Sukumaran Nair through an anonymous letter, written perhaps by a senior police official. The investigation by IGP Padmakumar would cover this aspect also. The recent visit by a senior police official to the NSS headquarters is under examination currently.
It is said that the State police had been tapping over 140 telephones for the past two months as part of monitoring extremist activities. The police would examine whether the anonymous letter to the NSS leader was part of a plan to thwart the tapping of phones in the anti-extremist operations.