CPM politburo member and Kerala secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan’s son Binoy Kodiyeri getting accused in a rape and sexual assault case involving a former dance bar girl in Dubai has rocked the Left in Kerala. But the (mis)deeds of children of political leaders cannot simply be brushed aside claiming, as the CPM has done, that these are personal cases and neither the politician father/mother nor his/her party has anything to do with all that. The children are majors and they should fight it out on their own is what parties and leaders have been claiming.

But the moot question remains on what was the strength of these children to commit crimes. Like in Binoy Kodiyeri’s case, it is not any ordinary person who has allegedly committed the crime. He is the son of a political leader who heads a leading party in one of its last bastions of Kerala. Are not such public figures morally responsible for the deeds of their children is a tricky question that leaders of all political hues would want avoid.

Incidentally, it is not his first case. Last year, he was involved in a fraud of Rs 13 crore in Dubai. His passport was impounded and very soon the case was settled.

This time the case is Binoy promised to marry the dancer girl who he met at the bar he used to frequent. He used to shower money on her. What his source of such big money was still remains unanswered. The relationship grew and she is a mother of an eight-year-old born out of that. The minor’s passport has Binoy’s name as its father. The records with the Mumbai police show that her passport too has his name. The woman even furnished proof of bank deposits made by Binoy for their upkeep.

Suddenly he stopped sending money and around a decade after she relationship, she came to know that he was already married. She demanded Rs 5 crore and received death threats. Her mother went to Mumbai for conciliation. But the woman was adamant.

When police came hunting for Binoy to Kerala from Mumbai, he went into hiding. The police went back after a week of hunting and have now issued a lookout notice. All this in a land where Kodiyeri was Home Minister during the last LDF term and his then predecessor, Pinarayi Vijayan, is now the Chief Minister and holds the Home portfolio.

The party central leadership that exists on the strength of the Kerala unit as it has lost all its forts in Bengal and Tripura too says it’s a personal matter and has nothing to do with the party.

The strength or assets of such children are certainly the political clout of their parents. In the Rs 13-crore financial fraud against Binoy last year, the party took the stand that it was for Binoy to settle it. Someone paid for Binoy which simply logic means it was done only for some favours in return which could be drawn from his father’s political clout.

Going beyond the party needed to look at how these children landed in plum posts abroad and who their sponsors were, political commentator Joseph C Mathew told The Covai Post.

Binoy, like many children of several CPM leaders from Kerala, went abroad not like most of the Keralites who have higher degree and better qualification but land in ordinary and often menial jobs. The moot question is why should these bigwigs, some even earlier booked in scandals like the infamous one that politically rocked Kerala at the start of this century, sponsor such children and place them in top positions when the can get better qualified hands.

The Right, Left and Centre are silent on this issue which speaks volumes. In contrast, when charges levelled years back against the son of the then Chief Minister and CPM veteran VS Achuthanandan with the silent support of the other faction in the CPM, VS demanded the charges in writing. He then asked the Opposition to name the official who should probe the matter. When charges of his son’s alleged connection with the lottery mafia that VS was fighting single-handedly cropped up, VS wrote to the Centre demanding a thorough probe into the mafia and also his son’s connections, if any, so that proper punishment coul be meted out.

Early this week, Pinarayi lashed out in the State Assembly against glorifying ‘PJ’ (P Jayarajan, former Kannur district secretary who intervened for the expat entrepreneur getting the building licence for his Rs 15-crore convention centre and failing to get committed suicide) claiming he had spoken against the CPM-led municipal council for its failure to grant the licence.

Guns are trained now against PJ like against VS earlier, Pinarayi fears Jayarajan, much adored by the party cadre and much-hated across Kerala for prompting murder politics in Kannur. But as Jayarajan said in his Facebook post that a section was putting out photographs of his son carrying stones and another working in a hotel. This was in comparison to other leaders whose children being ‘sponsored’ abroad and taught to live an ‘uncommunist’ life.

If the unbridled enthusiasm of the children to run riot on the political clout of their parents goes unchecked, the Left, like any other party, will soon wither away.