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Is there a political leader in Kerala apart from in the Marxist party and the chief minister's chair who has the reviling guts to cut and eat and gulp down like this even in the name of disaster and calamity relief?
P. S. Remesh Chandran
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
We call some people beastly. When a partly man-made and partly nature-made disaster occurred in Wayanadu in Kerala in July 2024 in which more than 600 people drowned in mud suffocating for breathe and died swept away by the mountain flood, asking for money to help in the relief works, a chief minister of the state demanding in person through media that it should be given by people never to the State Disaster Management Fund which is subject to the audit of the Central Auditor and Accountant General of India but directly to his own the Chief Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund which is not subject to any audit, has a history of he doing whatever he is pleased to do with it, and there is also a case for it in which the state corruption-prosecuting agency Lokayukta throwing to winds all judicial propriety and decency after partaking and relishing in his dinner party scratched his hind and saved his neck by acquitting him (actually not acquitting him because it was impossible due to the strength of evidence but by deciding that the Lokayukta was not empowered to prosecute him), and insisting publicly by coming before the media that such monies should pass only through the hands of the chief minister, what else should he be called by except bestial? What else is there in that language him to be called by? Then what is that word which is not obscene, though a little harsh, made for? Isn’t it the vibrant and ever-growing Malayalam language with enough apt words in it to pinpoint and describe anything and everything and anyone?
It was even while knowing that the centre also has a fund for this and that if relief donations were given to it, it will not go astray or get lost but will quickly reach the hands and homes of those who needed it, that this politician, this pseudo-communist, this chief minister, came in front of the public and raised such a demand. Isn't the central government his also? Is he outside India? Whether it is funds given to the centre or the state by people and institutions for relief, does it not reach the same place as the disaster victims? What if it reaches through whose hands? Isn’t it enough to see if it reaches where it should?
When a man sitting on a chair that the people gave and counts money as wages that the people gave (let him deny it!) comes and publicly stands before the people and says that he has no audit and so all people’s donations should be made to him or through him, instead of as he is obliged to of telling the people, if the people do not know it, that if it is given to the government agencies that are specifically created for disaster management, relief and prevention, they both have audits and so are accountable, that even if the leader cuts from it his rank-and-file officials who permit it will have to put it back when the audit is over, and so that's why the people should give it to the specific National and State Disaster Response Funds, then the people who do not seek and find a sharp stone or something like are more mentally disturbed than him. It happens, such a situation arises, when anarchy is rampant and at the peak of it in the state due to him and his high-ranking officials including his chief secretary and his police chief. What if this directly contributing to the chief minister’s relief fund is being used by criminals and manipulators to pay direct bribes to the government and the chief minister? Or is it even now being used for it?
It is with the threat to the public the Chief Minister has come forward that if they do not agree with and consent to this reaping of money through relief fundraiser campaigns and drives by him for his spendthrift life-style-doings and favoritism, if they raise objections that cause obstacles in his path to money and luxury, cases will be filed against them making their lives hell through the police and many other state governmental investigation and case-charging agencies who have lost their identity, personality and patriotism under him. Somewhere, it was heard too, that some cases have been taken against some individuals and some media to scare others. All these cases will come back as punishments for these officers for abuse of power. It is to a Chief Minister who has never studied law except those of corruption that the DGP of a state goes to study law- not to the Advocate General of the state! This is when even the state police force has thousands of brilliant law graduates! That law of corruption said about here which is the only law the chief minister has learned, like the Eleventh Commandment of Moses, is ‘even if you commit all the other ten crimes, you shall not be caught...!’
If you are enamored with and want certain public money and do not get it you will be disappointed and envy and lust for it will remain, like when the people of Kerala, whom he himself had declared as his enemies, interfered in everything from the Kerala-Rail to Selling-the-Sea to which all self-devised projects he lay his hands to for making personal money, and set out and worked hard and defeated them all and took revenge on a single day of voting in 2024 in the Parliament Elections by giving him back as a gift of disappointment and grief for all they had received as cruel administrative measures from him during the seven years since when he came to power in 2019. When there is such disappointment and grief on account of public money that could not be touched, those with common sense will remember that it is society that is on the opposite side and forget it. People who do not have such common sense but jumping down and setting out with a threat to the society for not allowing them to appropriate that public money is but the first time in Kerala.
The three and a half crores of people in Kerala have understood very well whose ass his high-ranking retinue of officers including the Chief Secretary and the DGP of the state, who have been pumped with air to remain in power till sixty years of age and for another three years if he remains as chief minister as a part of the BJP's Hindu Rashtra formation program are carrying on their shoulders and heads. As shown in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, it is plainly shown that Kerala is now united against that single power-toxicated apolitical figure named Pinarayi Vijayan, and if these retinue of rowdies do not recognize this change and shift of allegiance in Kerala, that too is good for the people because in 2024, it was against these crowd of politically degenerated officers also those people passed their judgement. It became clear on that day of election whether the people bornè what this crowd proudly carried or trampled it.
It is clear with this, with this threat raised by the Chief Secretary, Home Secretary and the Chief Minister against people, that the anti-corruption movement in Kerala is entering one of its most severe stages. It is getting to the stage of, sitting on the official chair of the Chief Minister and growing like a mountain of corruption under the ardent and careful protection of a more corrupt and national-assets-selling Central BJP, one threatening the people. That dire stage is nothing for his Marxist party which is already drowning in corruption and struggling frenzied for a bit of a breather with nothing left for them in the future, but what about the BJP ruling at the centre?
What the little Kerala has to say to this small bureaucratic force in Kerala is that the anti-corruption movement in India is very strong except perhaps under the BJP's rule, it is because of their protection of the corrupt like this that the BJP which was monolithic until the said election has now become a shambles and a party dependent on all its very small coalition parties even for taking small decisions, that anti-corruption movement in India through their searching for and securing concrete evidence has led to much richer chief ministers in much bigger states including Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar being caught for corruption along with their larger than this army of high-ranking officials, convicted and sent to and locked up in jails, and that even though they fought all the way to the Supreme Court, no matter how much money they had, no matter how many crowds of people were behind them in their parties and in society, no matter how many corporate forces backed by money and legal power tried to save them, they remained there on the strength of that evidence.
Even in this little Kerala, late Balakrishna Pillai who was the Minister of Power involved in the Idamalayar Dam Case, was got arrested and punished by the anti-corruption people of Kerala in their relentless struggle, and the then highest official of the Electricity Board who collaborated with him and became a co-accused, one Ramabhadran Nair, who was already at the age of eighty-six or ninety-two years after his retirement and convicted, was lifted with his hospital bed while lying sick and debilitated and transported to and locked up in jail. During the former Chief Minister Karunakaran's time, they fought brutally and did more against the complainants than what these bureaucrats and their Chief Minister are doing now during Pinarayi Vijayan's time.
In the case of Idamalayar, after not stopping and discouraged by a high court verdict setting the accused free, the one who appealed to the Supreme Court and obtained this sentence was comrade V. S. Achyuthanandan who was a part of the anti-corruption movement in Kerala and also another more senior and serious leader and the then Chief Minister of that very same Marxist Party. In the later SNC-Lavalin Electricity Corruption Case also which is exactly similar, as the present chief minister and Marxist leader Vijayan followed suit by sidelining even the High Court Judges and getting himself acquitted temporarily for a time-being (the CBI’s appeal against this high court judge’s controversial verdict is going on in the Supreme Court!), it is not surprising that who went to the Supreme Court with an appeal was again the same com. V. S. Achyuthanandan from that very same party. And that Vijayan who was the Minister for Power then in the Lavalin Case is the Chief Minister now, for that Supreme Court appeal is pending and the central BJP is helping by postponing it indefinitely through the same CBI without ever coming for hearing. Although the Chief Minister and these officers of his who sprang up today through the intervention of a few foreign and indigenous investors have forgotten this, the activists in this party did not but remembered it, and that's why even laying axe to the very roots of their own party and not to the branches, the workers of this party in the said election defeated thoroughly and laid in whites this Pinarayi Vijayan and this team of his officials, asking them if they were going to try again. Now that little official team and that little minister are trying again!
It is for the people to know and get information that the people have taken their money out of exchequer and paid salaries to and appointed officials like the chief secretary and the government secretaries; they are not for the chief minister to make obey and comply with his private agenda. The people have now realized that this flock of pea-brained and flawed bureaucrats who are said to have studied for and passed such all India civil service examinations like the IAS and the IPS are not even able to understand what a danger the bureaucracy of the state will be in, will face, if these officials move and drift into the the dangerous and reactionary misconception that it is the chief minister, not the people, who is the centre of power and start programmes accordingly that way and in that belief and threaten the members of the public like this, and the people begin to give them the same value they are now giving this chief minister. Anarchy is the term given to that condition, and called.
It was to avoid this, to avoid this state of anarchy, that the society has tolerated bureaucracy at least a little. Guess what will happen if this bureaucracy including the police too collapses and what will be the state of affairs! The most this bureaucracy expected trouble so far for them from was the three or four Naxalites who were said to be in the state of Kerala. But can the protection given to the chief minister be given to these officials also throughout the state through the police? It seems it is impossible to tell what will happen if their official car given by people were stopped at a traffic light at any intersection in the midst of people in the present conditions.
Even small children all over the world know what the yellow, green and red colors at the traffic lights mean and what the signal is for. If the central government issues an orange alert about the weather, rains, landslides and the earth splitting away in a place, it means they should start preparing, don't wait until the red alert, and this known to everyone except those who surround themselves with insolent rowdies by taking heavy salaries from people’s hands and giving it to them and lives in careless wantonness in their midst without a government's vigilance or guard.
Of the considerable amounts that were given by people as relief funds for the victims of calamities that have occurred many times, through purposeful laxity in spending them for real needs, several crores of rupees are still remaining with the government, which is kept as a loose fund that can be laid hands on and stolen from anytime. It is kept as reserve money for corruption and embezzlement. A large part of it lies in the Chief Minister's relief fund. The society does understand their fear that if they take from it for new relief work without replenishing it with new donations, and if new donations do not come, then eating into it will stop without anything to eat into, the body will shake, hands will tremble, and mental stupor, discomfort, disorder and illness will follow.
But people don't have any medicine for it. What they have in their hands is the medicine to save the rest of the public money which is in the state as theirs. Because of this, those who understand that the society, which now has a public debt of close to three and a half lakh crore rupees, will go to any lengths to survive without loosing even a penny more from what it has now, may be able to survive and remain in Kerala with certain conditions in the future. Society has no constitutional obligation to maintain delinquents, only mechanisms to terminate them.
It was mainly two things that came out as happened around the first of August 2024 raising people's protest. One, natural disaster scientists or officials in Kerala should not visit calamity-strewn areas, study, or talk to anyone except the dumb-witted foolish and the ignorant at the top without their permission. Two, if people call to pay only to audited central and state disaster relief funds instead of paying money to the chief minister's relief fund, which has no audit, they will be sued and crushed and broken. It's only natural that one occasionally forgets how much severe a spotlight and searchlight the people have already put him under after his many anti-people activities! That's why both of these actions have come from the Chief Minister. He will have to pull both of these back as fast as he opens and shuts his eyes.
We all know that the Marxist Party is now a money laundering and cheating private group after being in the hands of him and some of his collaborating foreign corporate capitalists, but if he sits on the chair of the Chief Minister and does this, does anyone expect the people will stand mute and watch? Only everyone's Kerala is here... not just anyone's. Even if the Kerala Lokayukta which ate his dinner, head spinned and brain and conscience upturned did not investigate, the Supreme Court should investigate what was done with all the funds that passed through his hands previously.
The people of Kerala have understood that if this particular disaster is removed, all other disasters will fade away, stop on its own by itself, and will be over. Isn't it better to tie and seal this tragedy inside a fitting coin sack and throw it into the very flood water?
Written on 01 August 2024 and first published on: 10 August 2024
Original article in Malayalam written on 01 August 2024 and first published on: 02 August 2024
SM1621. ദുരിതാശ്വാസത്തി൯റ്റെപേരിലായാലു്പ്പോലും ഇതുപോലെവെട്ടിത്തിന്നാ൯ കുത്സിതമുള്ളൊരുരാഷ്ട്രീയനേതാവു് കേരളത്തിലു് മാ൪കു്സ്സിസ്സു്റ്റുപാ൪ട്ടിയിലും മുഖ്യമന്ത്രിക്കസേരയിലുമല്ലാതെയുണു്ടോ?
https://sahyadrimalayalam.blogspot.com/2024/08/1621.html
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