Political slander and vulgar personal attacks on CPM’s Vadakara candidate K.K. Shailaja have vitiated the election campaign in the north Kerala constituency where the fingers are now pointed at the Congress and its youth wing.
Former health minister Shailaja, who is locked in a close fight with Shafi Parambil of the Congress, has lodged a complaint with the Election Commission over ceaseless misogynistic and vulgar cyber-attacks on her allegedly from the camp of her main rival.
The New Mahe police station in Kannur district filed a suo motu case on Wednesday and booked an Indian Union Muslim League leader, T.H. Aslam, on the charge of circulating a fake video clip of Shailaja.
Aslam, who is the New Mahe panchayat secretary and chairman of the local unit of the Congress-led United Democratic Front, was booked under IPC Section 153 (wantonly giving provocation to cause riots) and the Kerala Police Act 120(o) (causing a nuisance with undesirable message through any means).
In her complaint to the poll panel, Shailaja, formerly a school teacher, cited several instances of cyber attacks against her, one of them morphing her face in a sleaze video clip that was widely circulated among neighbourhood and even family WhatsApp groups.
In one instance, Shailaja noted in her complaint, those behind the cyber attacks forged a letterhead in the name of revered scholar A.P. Aboobacker Musaliar in which she was described as “Bomb amma and not teacher amma”. Shailaja is fondly referred to as Teacher.
She alleged that cyber attackers morphed one of her photographs to make it look like she was close to an accused in a recent bomb blast in Kannur. One person died and another suffered serious injuries when a country bomb they were making went off at Panoor in Kannur district recently.
The issue had snowballed into a major controversy with the Opposition alleging they were all CPM members, while the CPM denied the charges.
“They are not just attacking me as a candidate, but me as a woman. They are spreading lies and altering my speeches and statements by creating fake IDs in their vicious attacks against me,” she told a channel on Wednesday.
CPM state secretary M.V. Govindan slammed the Congress for “encouraging” such vulgar and misogynistic attacks against his party colleague. “They are resorting to such cheap tactics since they know they are losing,” he told the media on Wednesday.
The leader of the Opposition, V.D. Satheesan, rubbished the CPM allegation and said they were trying to hide their faces in view of the progress the Congress candidate had made in Vadakara. “The CPM has been hit hard by the Panoor bomb incident. So when the bomb politics got busted, they are coming out against us with a lie bomb,”
he alleged.
