May 24, 1999

On the eve of elections the ruling LDF and the Congress slug it out over the rape of a minor girl in Suryanelli.

By M G Radhakrishnan

The Congress seems to have made a rather inauspicious start to its preparations for the forthcoming elections. It was yet to recover from the heat and dust generated by the murder of Delhi model Jessica Lall allegedly by the son of its Chandigarh unit chief Venod Sharma when another senior leader, P.J. Kurien, finds himself in the dock for his alleged involvement in the rape of a minor girl in Kerala. While Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked Sharma to step down almost immediately, the party is undecided this time.

Kurien, 59, a six-term MP and the Congress' chief whip in the recently dissolved Lok Sabha, was on May 7 declared prima facie accused in the 1996 rape case by the Peermedu judicial magistrate and summoned to appear before the court on June 7. The order follows a private complaint on March 15 this year by the now 18-year-old victim from Suryanelli in Idukki district. She alleged she had been sexually molested by Kurien in February 1996 at a panchayat resthouse in Kumily -- a hill station near Idukki -- while he was on a visit to Kerala.

The scandal first hit the headlines in March 1996 when the Class IX student, who had disappeared from her school hostel in Munnar on January 16, resurfaced 40 days later and filed a complaint with the police that she had been sold into the flesh trade by the boy she loved and forced to entertain politicians and advocates during the period. Kurien, whom she identified from a newspaper photograph, was one of them, she charged.

When the police refused to make Kurien an accused in the case, the girl's parents petitioned the then chief minister A.K. Antony, who appointed a DSP to probe the charge in March 1996. But the DSP and two subsequent police teams exonerated Kurien, saying he was not at the Kumily resthouse that day. The Congress too says that he was elsewhere at the time the girl claims she was raped. The police framed charges against 42 others identified by the girl. Kurien, on his part, filed a defamation suit last year against Chief Minister E.K. Nayanar, the girl, her father and the CPI(M) mouthpiece Desabhimani for making "unsubstantiated" allegations against him.

By a strange coincidence, the issue was reopened in March this year and the complainant brought in two witnesses who testified they had seen Kurien at the Kumily resthouse on the day the incident happened. With polls just a few months away, the Congress finds itself in a bind because its much-touted Pachmarhi Resolution stipulates that election tickets be denied to those facing criminal cases.

The communists in Kerala are elated at the discomfiture of both Kurien and the Congress. "Sonia was quick to direct Venod Sharma to resign after his son Manu shot dead Lall. Why is Kurien being spared?" asked one left leader in an oblique allusion to the fact that Kurien, who belongs to the powerful Marthomite Church, is also Sonia's link to that community.

After generating much acrimony in the 1996 and 1998 elections, the Suryanelli case has triggered another war of words between the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) -- the Congress is a part of it -- in the state. Former KPCC chief Vayalar Ravi, MP, calls it a leftist conspiracy. "This is the CPI(M)'s political game to implicate Congress leaders in false cases at the time of elections," he says. The LDF rubbishes such charges. "The UDF is trying to shift the blame to the CPI(M) because it fears that implementing the Pachmarhi Resolution would deny a ticket to Kurien in the coming elections," says Pinarayi Vijayan, the CPI(M) state secretary.

The incident has also thrown Antony, Kurien's mentor and the head of the party's Ethics Committee, in a quandary. Though he has promised to examine the issue "if it comes before the committee", he is obviously awaiting orders from "madam".

The case has already been in the courts for over three years without making much headway. Last week Nayanar said the Government would set up the promised special court for speedy disposal of the case after the high court's clearance. The victim lives in fear under police protection following threats to her life. Shunned by her friends and relatives having given up her studies, the traumatised girl suffers the ignominy of a confined life. Her tormentors, however, roam free.

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