Thiruvananthapuram The politicisation of allegations of sexual abuse by a woman against three top CPI(M) leaders riveted public attention in Kerala for the second consecutive day on Tuesday.
The alleged victim, a suspect in the UAE gold smuggling case, stoked the scandal by publishing selfies allegedly sent to her by a prominent CPI(M) leader. She warned that she had more incriminating evidence and challenged the politician to sue her for libel so that she could produce proof of the latter’s “wrongdoing” in a court of law. The politician has protested his innocence in a Facebook post, eliciting a sharp response from the woman.
She had raised similar charges against two other top CPI(M) leaders. Both of them have denied the indictments.
Nevertheless, the CPI(M) leaders seemed hard-pressed to spell out why they had not brought a suit against the alleged victim for slander.
The accuser was a top employee of the UAE consulate during the tenure of the previous Left Democratic Front government. She wielded considerable influence in the corridors of power then. After an year-long incarceration as a COFEPOSA prisoner, the woman had emerged as a fierce critic of the CPI(M). She attempted to implicate the top Left Democratic Front leadership in the gold case and accused those at the government’s helm of using the UAE consulate for private profiteering.
CPI(M) State secretary M. V. Govindan maintained that the accusations raised by a discredited economic offender did not warrant a response. The CPI(M) called her a cat’s paw of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and pointed to her brief employment by an alleged Sangh Parivar front organisation after her prison release. She has become a political cudgel in the hands of the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Both have demanded that the police take cognisance of her allegations.
The Congress accused the police of partisan hypocrisy in responding to complaints of sexual misconduct against CPI(M) leaders and overzealousness in pursuing similar complaints against Opposition politicians.
