Union Minister of State for External Affairs V. Muraleedharan expressed concern within the manner during which Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan went ahead and appointed a Judicial Commission to probe the action taken by the Enforcement Directorate officials to pressurize two prime accused within the gold smuggling case to confess against Vijayan.
The government orders for the new judicial probe came out the opposite day and this probe was announced before the Assembly polls.
It will be headed by Justice (rtd) V.K. Mohan and therefore the terms of reference even have been given.
Muraleedharan wrote during a Facebook post that if this is often the way things are getting to be taken forward by Vijayan, which is an attack on the federal structure, then it isn’t getting to be wealthy.
“If Vijayan is resorting to such things within the wake of the electoral victory, then things won’t be wealthy. It’s using public money that Vijayan has appointed this Commission which too to probe the events that happened under his government. He should think that aside from wasting public money there’ll be no good as there are numerous Commission reports which have not seen the sunshine of the day and hence wasting public money during these bad times doesn’t augur good,” said Muraleedharan.
Incidentally, this new move comes at a time when in April, Vijayan suffered a setback after the Kerala supreme court quashed the 2 FIRs registered against the Enforcement Directorate officials by the Crime Branch unit of Kerala police within the exact same case.
The premise of this judicial probe is predicated on a complaint by two women police officials that they were allegedly being pressurized to testify that the gold smuggling case accused Swapna Suresh was coerced into giving statements implicating Vijayan within the case.
According to the 2 women police officials, who were providing security to Swapna Suresh, when under judicial custody, that that they had heard of the ED pressurizing her to call Vijayan.
Incidentally, when Vijayan went about this by registering a case by the Crime Branch and therefore the then announced judicial probe Union Ministers including Home Minister Amit Shah, Nirmala Sitharaman among others had slammed such move by the Kerala government.
