359. Cannot the Enforcement Directorate keep back from coming to Kerala, to avoid dishonoring the history of crime investigation?

359

Cannot the Enforcement Directorate keep back from coming to Kerala, to avoid dishonoring the history of crime investigation?

Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum

Article Title Image By Adobe Stock. Graphics: Adobe SP.

Cannot the Enforcement Directorate keep back from coming to Kerala, so as not to dishonor the history of criminal investigation? It is cases where if even ordinary people’s vigilance committees investigate the most high-profile culprits will be caught and put in prison that the ED is investigating in Kerala and submitting ridiculous reports, bringing disgrace to the history of world criminal investigation. Reading these reports even the people’s courts that may meet on shop verandahs or at road corners will tell them to ‘take it away and bring a fully investigated report’ and ask ‘why couldn't you catch the real culprit’.

A person named A tells or orders a person named B to smuggle gold. B smuggles gold 32 times, the information is found out by foreign intelligence agencies and handed over to someone in India, someone probably in the former ruling party of India, is caught by the customs who were in eternal sleeping mode till then, and handed over to the ED, who also investigates, and stops the investigation at the point where how could B sitting in his immediate superior A’s office for such a long time, experiencing and enjoying and exerting all the power delegated by A, wielding the power of A through foreign embassies and consulates, smuggle gold a number of times through foreign countries, without A’s information and direction. Isn’t this what the Enforcement Directorate come to Kerala for? Isn't this futile festival of investigation spending a lot of public money?

There is something called logical assumption in the history of criminal investigation. Scotland Yard or FBI will not say, nothing was said by B about the role of A, so the investigation is ended here and the case is closed. They will investigate whether there has been any increase in the income of the person A, what job he has been doing, whether there has been any increase in the income of his family members, where his investments and hordings are kept, how often he has traveled abroad, where he has stayed during that time, who has visited him there, who has provided the funds for his travels and stay, who has borne the expenses, etc., etc. No only will his mobile phones and laptops be seized and checked, but also passwords and data stored in paid and free cloud drive services looked into. They will find evidence, even if it is deleted but left as bits of meaningless-looking strings in cyberspace, and confront B about A's role. And it will all be filmed live on video too.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his political tools, the ED and the CBI, are people who think that the people of Kerala are not intelligent enough to know all this. Having said that, is there any shortage in the power and resources of these two? Did they need any more power to conduct these investigations and inspections; did they have to take permission from anyone? Were the raids, taking along the media with and accompanied by press photographers, at the residences and offices of people ranging from Farooq Abdullah, the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, to P. Chidambaram of Tamil Nadu, the former Union Finance Minister (then ED’s own minister!) conducted after taking their permission and after asking for their convenience? Do not try to challenge the people of Kerala who know all this by showing cheap political ground stunts! Do not forget that tens of thousands of people who have retired from the Central Investigation Agencies and various State Investigation Agencies still alive are in the general public of Kerala today. They are watching not what the ED did, but what it did not do.

What the ED tells Keralites to believe is that the Chief Minister Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan’s Principal Secretary, Sivasankaran (B), took the dollar bags from the Chief Minister’s house, which is heavily guarded by the government, and delivered them to the consulate of a foreign country UAE in Trivandrum, and as (if) ordered by their or India’s Ministry of External Affairs told them to put them in their diplomatic bags and deliver them to the Chief Minister's destination before the Chief Minister (A) arrived abroad there on the plane, these foreign cousins of theirs did exactly that, and the Chief Minister stood there, dumbfounded, innocent.

The central agencies with unlimited resources and unquestioned authority are telling the people of Kerala to believe what the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government at the centre and the Marxist Party government in the state through their agents the Customs and ED and the mainstream media in Kerala told, that when sitting in the Chief Minister's office, the Chief Minister's Principal Secretary and a horde of his other officers were for two and a half years, smuggling tons of gold into the country through foreign consulates, airports, and ports on thirty-two occasions and selling them on the way, the State Police, Intelligence, Crime Branch, and Special Branch controlled by the Chief Minister and the ED, Intelligence, Customs, and other crime investigation and information collecting agencies controlled by the central government, were lying down with arthritis, motionless with their hands, feet, and heads paralyzed, just as they have told the courts! The courts believed but the people did not.

The people of the state are made to note in memory and remember that the organized computerized fraud and black money-laundering transactions worth tens of thousands of crores of rupees in all the cooperative banks in Kerala including the notorious and massive one in the Karuvannur Cooperative Bank were not controlled by the Chief Minister, the Cooperative Minister and the Finance Minister, but by just a Marxist Party Local Area Committee member Aravindakshan lying in and operating from Cannanore and unimportant in Trichur, a Cannanore resident, and a few Corporation Councilors from Trichur, and that the Kerala government, the Chief Minister and the Finance Minister have no role in the disappearance of crores of dollars given by foreign organizations and governments as aid for the flood relief in Kerala!

The people of Kerala had once expected that the judiciary would ask more questions and raise more issues than the ones asked and raised here.

Written on 19 October 2023 and first published in English on: 05 February 2026