God’s Own Country fights ‘CIA demon’

This follows the local media cornering the Left and its government almost every other day.

“If what our intelligence reports say on such activity is found serious enough, the Central Government would be informed,” VS Achuthanandan told the Assembly today. He was responding to a submission from opposition MLA K Babu taking off from a question raised on 5 March, seeking to know if the government believed that the CIA was behind the media syndicate in the state.

VS added that he would “neither deny nor confirm” findings about a media syndicate operating in the state. His response today was also a sequel to his remarks in the Assembly last fortnight, when he talked about indications that a section of the media was being controlled by a foreign agency. He had stridently refused to disclose the details claiming that would affect “international relations”. The Kerala Union of Working Journalists had been raising a din, daring VS to come out with the details, but he claimed in the Assembly today that his words had been “misinterpreted”. His government, he maintained, was all for a free press.

It was Pinarayi Vijayan, CPM state secretary and VS’s arch party foe who first talked a month ago about the “Media Syndicate”, a supposed bourgeois apparition that he blames directly for news the party leadership could do without. And less directly, for putting VS on a pedestal and pitting him against the state party leadership. He had alleged that this Syndicate was behind the selective hounding of himself and his men like Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan. He had also not minced no words about the media trying to use VS to spite him and ruin the party.

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