Weekly post-cabinet briefings are for Chief Minister V D Satheesan what regular floor mopping is for households. If the latter prevents dirt from accumulating, the briefings sweep away political suspicions before they pile on too thick to dislodge.
Pinarayi Vijayan, on the other hand, took his own time to clear doubts. This allowed public perceptions hostile to the CPM to incrementally grow and solidify. Satheesan has learnt his lessons.
There were two issues that had the potential to embarrass the CM last week. His supposedly warm relations with Youth Congress workers who were caught with high-end drugs and the allegation that he had asked Meta to remove content that was critical of him. The CPM branded this ‘social media emergency’. Both these charges were dealt with during the last post-cabinet briefing.
During the last briefing, the CM had laid down the chronology of his meetings with Muhammad Hussain, the main accused in the MDMA case. He said he contacted Hussain for the first time after he was hospitalised in the Nava Kerala Sadas police brutality in December 2023.
The second charge that he acted in an undemocratic fashion was also brushed aside last week. He said the government had not approached Meta to remove posts that discredited him. The CM also assured that the government would stand by the aggrieved parties (media organisations whose anti-Satheesan posts were taken down) if they complained to Meta.
One round of explanation is not enough to remove sticky doubts. The CM sought to clear the lingering patches of doubts during the post-cabinet briefing on Tuesday. The CPM had pulled out evidence showing Satheesan with Hussain from 2021, trying to establish that the CM had lied about contacting Hussain only in 2023.
The second question to the CM on Tuesday was about photographs from 2021 of him with Hussain. “There might be such photographs. It is only natural that we are met by many people and photographs are taken with them. What is the big deal,” is how the CM responded. “I was speaking about the time I got introduced to him for the first time. I had made things very clear last time,” he said, banging a tight lid on the topic.
The Meta issue came up as one of the last posers on Tuesday. The CM reiterated that the state government had not asked Meta to remove any posts. “Fact is, this is happening across India, in all states. Why are only cases in Kerala being held up,” he said. The CM called it “cheap propaganda”.
But then he was told of Meta’s explanation that the content was removed “following an official legal requirement”. “What has a government to do with a legal requirement. It is a legal requirement based on their (Meta’s) algorithm,” the CM said.
He also made a virtue of his promise that the UDF government would officially ask Meta to restore posts damning him if the news channels approached Meta. “Has any CM in India made such an offer,” Satheesan said. Here is Satheesan’s motto: Constant scrubbing in the form of regular press briefings can eventually make the allegation vanish.
However, the first poser to the CM on the day was about the failure to provide Onam kits, an issue the CPM has championed. “It is fake news,” Satheesan began.
The CM was ready with the latest figures. “By 2.30 pm today, we have kept 6.27 lakh Onam kits ready, though the demand is only for 5.96 lakh kits. Nearly half the number, 3.69 lakh kits, have already reached ration shops. Of them, 75,855 kits have been received by card holders,” he said, and added: “And still, there is a widespread campaign that Onam kits are not being distributed.”
Another issue for which the UDF government had received flak was Governor Rajendra Arlekar’s move to summon the State Police Chief for a briefing on the student protests at the Kalady Sree Shankaracharya Sanskrit University.
The other day, Opposition Leader Pinarayi Vijayan called the move “a naked violation of constitutional principles and an open challenge to democracy”. “It is shameful that the UDF government is fearful of uttering a word against this show of excessive power,” Pinarayi said.
The CM sounded a bit dismissive about the question, like he was fed up with the Governor’s action. “We have expressed our stand in very strong terms. We have already made it clear that it is wrong to directly summon an officer. That an officer should be called only through the government is the UDF’s declared stand,” Satheesan said.
And then he used the occasion to revive public memory. “This is not the first time that such a thing is happening. In October 2018, when Justice Sathasivam was Governor, the then DGP Loknath Behra was called to the Raj Bhavan. In December 2023, both the Chief Secretary and the DGP were summoned by Governor Arif Mohammad Khan citing an SFI attack on the Governor’s cavalcade. They were even instructed to slap cases against these students under IPC section 124 (a non-bailable offence for wrongfully restraining the President or governor),” the CM said, and added: When all this happened, the Chief Minister was Pinarayi Vijayan.”
That was not all. The CM said Governor Arif Khan had summoned the Chief Secretary and the DGP after Pinarayi’s Malappuram speech in 2020. (The speech was made as part of the Constitution Protection Rally during the fight against the Citizenship Amendment Act and in the midst of it Pinarayi used the provocative colonial epithet ‘resident’ to address the Governor.) “I have all these newspaper cuttings with me,” the CM said. And then, in a tone of sarcasm, added: “Last day when the Opposition Leader talked I wondered whether this was the first time an officer was summoned by the Governor.”
These weekly briefings achieve two objectives: Clear doubts about the government and, at the same time, sustain the prevailing doubts about the Opposition.
