It’s not quite a take-off on the 1989 movie, Sex, Lies and Videotape, though it could be dubbed as Kerala’s own version of it. Right on the heels of hotelier and bar baron Biju Ramesh coming up with bribery charges against senior ministers, another sordid saga is unfolding. And holding centrestage this time too is a Biju, though a different one.
Biju Radhakrishan, the main accused not only in the solar case but serving a jail sentence for murdering his first wife, apart from a slew of cheating cases, let loose a volley of allegations of sexual and monetary favours received by other senior members of the state cabinet, including Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and a couple of other ministers in the UDF cabinet. And dispensing those favours under the first category, according to the jail bird, was his now estranged partner Sarita S Nair. Sarita was quick to deny the allegations as malafide and a figment of Biju’s imagination.
Now, it is up to Biju to provide the seedy tape — CD, pen-drive or whatever — confirming his charges by midweek as the Solar Commission has set December 10 as the deadline to hand over the incriminating tapes. And thereby lend credence to the Opposition’s refrain that the Chief Minister resign. If none of these things transpire, then the people of the state would be left with a lingering distaste about another barrage of charges, which though not proven, may well have planted some seeds of doubt among a section of the electorate. In which case, the allegations would’ve served their purpose up to a point, as Assembly elections are only a few months away.
A counter-offensive has been mounted by the ruling dispensation to establish what entire Kerala has always suspected — that there indeed was a sex motif involving one of its erstwhile ministers and the lady in question a couple of years ago. The natural question that begs an answer is why this escapade was not disclosed then. After all, there is something called propriety and the need for those holding public office to be seen as doing what is morally right. But that was not to be then. Now, it is an attempt to explain it away as something that happened in the past and that too to someone who is no longer part of the ruling alliance.
Welcome to the theatre of the lurid and quite often the absurd. The state Assembly became the venue of a no-holds barred battle when the state budget was presented by Finance Minister Mani in mid-March. Curiously, the government named the six MLAs in the report filed before the additional sessions court for destruction of property during the budget presentation early last week, followed a couple of days later by the lurid revelations by Biju.
It is not as if these developments can be termed aberrations in a state where otherwise most days begin and end on a sanguine note. On the contrary. The dark, regressive mood in the state finds reflection as much in the statement that women are not equal to men neither do they have any business in aspiring to be so as it does in acts of omission and commission where clumsy efforts are made to find pliant police officers to man critical posts. It is not always that the judiciary can intervene with telling observations about Caesar’s wife being above suspicion.
Fresh incidents almost every other day see new depths being plumbed by the social and political actors. You have paedophiles who take voyeuristic pleasure in online sites and activists who also double up trafficking in minors. There can be no final word on the cause and effect sequence, but one cannot ignore the rise of the moral brigade that feels young men and women should not share a bench in college campuses.
Curiously, the same society felt it was necessary that Kerala host this year’s National Schools Athletic Championship, with young boys and girls convening at the same venue because another state, Maharashtra, decreed otherwise.
It’s a mixed bag, a curious cauldron of assorted values and sensibilities. Not all of this can be simplistically explained away as a natural gravitation where at the fulcrum is the state Assembly elections scheduled for April-May, 2016.
Consider SNDP supremo Vellapally Natesan coming out with statements about how solatiums for people dying in harness are distributed on the basis of religion and that minorities rule Kerala. That he believes is a part of the larger template if the mission to forge a third political front in Kerala — Bharat Dharma Jana Sena — is to succeed. But, taking recourse to legal intervention to counter what is essentially a political initiative can only be viewed as a knee-jerk reaction.
Meanwhile, charges and counter-charges will be traded and the decibel levels will continue to rise in the coming days. At the same time, the script need not read like the one used in the location shoot for a soap opera, replete with mudslinging and smear campaigns. The text and the syntax could still maintain a certain level of decorum. Surely, the people of Kerala deserve it.