# Ajayan | It may be a coincidence that the day the VD Satheesan Government unveiled its Bill for the elderly, it also appeared to extend a helping hand to octogenarian Pinarayi Vijayan in the CMRL case before the High Court. But four months out of the Opposition, it seems, was enough for the Congress to develop a spectacular amnesia about its own strident accusations against Vijayan. The UDF’s emphatic mandate has thus acquired an unwelcome aftertaste: voters asked for a change of government and got, instead, a remarkable change of memory.
The CMRL controversy was among the many blemishes on the previous Vijayan Government that the electorate repudiated at the polls. The Income-Tax Department’s interim report and the Serious Fraud Investigation Office findings lent weight to allegations that payments to Vijayan’s daughter were made without corresponding services, allegedly because she was the daughter of an “important” politician. In the Opposition, Satheesan had thundered for a vigilance probe, turning the issue into a prominent plank of the UDF’s election campaign. Those were the days when accountability was a battle cry. In office, it appears to have become a rather inconvenient obligation.
When the Enforcement Directorate subsequently presented material pointing to an alleged wider money-laundering operation involving Vijayan’s son-in-law and former minister Riyas, and sought an FIR from the State police, the Satheesan team seemed to lose its appetite for the very action it had once demanded. Instead of registering an FIR, the government opted for a special investigation team and questioned the ED’s findings. If the exercise was only a preliminary inquiry, the prescribed 14-day deadline became another uncomfortable clock to watch. The matter dragged on until a private individual was compelled to approach the court. The government’s celebrated zeal for accountability had developed a remarkably selective compass.
Those suspecting the government of shielding Vijayan are hardly short of grounds for their suspicions, though suspicion is not proof of a clandestine understanding. An FIR, based on the Advocate-General’s report and material in the ED report, would have placed the matter on a formal legal footing, leaving its merits to be tested. Instead, the government chose an inquiry without an FIR. As a senior Congress leader privately observed, the delay ultimately forced a private citizen to move the court through a writ petition. Without that intervention, critics suspect, the episode might have quietly fizzled out, an outcome Vijayan and his camp would scarcely have had reason to regret. When urgency evaporates precisely where accountability is demanded, questions about political convenience are inevitable.
The government’s courtroom performance only deepened the unease. It executed a startling U-turn, declining to press for an FIR and reportedly leaving even Vijayan’s camp surprised. Worse, it sought to belittle the petitioner, a man who had taken on Vijayan and stood by his bete noire, VS Achuthanandan, during the CPM’s bitter factional wars. The government appeared less interested in the substance of the allegations than in diminishing the person who brought them before the court. Legal conviction seemed to retreat as political calculation took centrestage.
Eventually, the government registered an FIR in compliance with the court’s order. Vijayan and his team then approached the Division Bench to challenge the Single Bench’s directive. Yet the government seemed almost more anxious than the petitioner’s opponents to proclaim its reluctance, repeatedly stressing that it had acted only because the court had ordered it to. Its attempt to disparage the petitioner continued, while the argument shifted to technicalities over whether the Single Bench could entertain a writ petition bearing the character of public interest litigation.
The Division Bench must decide the legal issues before it. But the political irony is already plain. A government that once demanded action with such thunderous conviction now appears eager to disclaim responsibility for taking it. The FIR may stand or fall according to law; the questions raised by the government’s delay and courtroom retreat will not disappear so easily. For a regime elected on promises of change, accountability cannot be outsourced to the judiciary. When the court must supply the urgency that the government conspicuously lacks, the mandate begins to look less like a covenant with voters and more like a script rewritten after the curtain has risen.
The Satheesan Government’s spectacular backtracking has left Congress ranks squirming, with all likelihood of an internal revolt against this political somersault. Suspicions of a cosy understanding with Vijayan have fertile soil, even if suspicion is not proof. The Congress once accused Vijayan of being hand-in-glove with the BJP; now, its own government risks inviting similar questions through its conspicuous reluctance to act. Election-time thunder about accountability has dwindled to an office-bound whisper. Power, it seems, has a peculiar alchemy: it can turn yesterday’s crusaders into today’s custodians of convenient silence.
Tailpiece: At the Jantar Mantar agitation, Vijayan publicly acknowledged that police act on orders from above, an admission that sits uneasily beside the brutal treatment of black-flag protesters, with batons, lathis and even flowerpots becoming props in the theatre of “protection”. Only a day ago, he told the Assembly that police had used both hands to rain blows on protesting SFI activists. The assault on Alappuzha legislator AD Thomas by the Chief Minister’s security personnel during the 2023 Nava Kerala Sadas was cut from the same cloth. The baton may change hands, but the choreography remains familiar: orders from above, blows from below, and accountability nowhere in sight.