An officer who trusted his masters blindly

He is the fidayeen bureaucrat; trained for special operations but destined to be denounced if martyred and disowned if caught alive.

Suspended IAS officer K Suresh Kumar finds himself in a situation similar to the one terrorist Qasab has landed himself in; both trusted their handlers – the Left in the former case and Lashkar-e-Toiba in the latter – to bail them out if the escape route was blocked. And both today find themselves orphaned as they stare into a dark uncertain future.

The whistle-blower bureaucrat is a born maverick and quite eccentric in his approach. He will do anything, including phone tapping in one case, to prove his point of view.

Suresh Kumar does not care for anyone when it comes to action but trusts whoever has commissioned him for an assignment.

And that is why Kerala saw him stating well-known facts about the Chief Minister’s office on the eve of the great betrayal by V S Achuthanandan. Of course, the politician in VS cannot be expected to support Suresh’s maverick views.

But it was the seed of realpolitik being planted in full display; a fact underlined by E P Jayarajan’s statement that Suresh was trying to revive legal interest in the SNC Lavalin case. So, once again, it is boiling down to Pinarayi and VS: The shameless ego clash that has held the state to ransom for the last two years and more.

The whole controversy has a new subplot that has VS’s commando doing a fidayeen-style recce in Delhi to identify vulnerable legal points that can hurt Pinarayi.

Though VS is perforce tonguetied, we expect him to confirm or deny this allegation rather than leave it to the ousted officer to slap a reply. And Chief Minister Achuthanandan has to do at least this much for Suresh, given his contribution to moulding the VS myth. It was Suresh who briefed the Chief Minister on many crucial issues like the lottery scam and the ice cream parlour case when he was the Opposition Leader.

The mistake of the CPM is in identifying Suresh as a VS stooge. For it is the same officer who exposed a scam in the Fisheries Department involving a strong VS-group woman leader while working as the Fisheries Secretary.

That he is disliked by both the UDF (for exposing the lottery scam) and the Left Democratic Front (for reasons known) in itself endorses his honesty. Any comrade still in doubt about his integrity is advised to give him another challenging profile to convince him/herself of this fact.

Middle class Kerala may not be too concerned if VS loses his chief ministership and Pinaryi his secretary’s post in the imminent political fallout of the current controversy.

They will continue to support bureaucrats like Suresh as not many of his ilk, who practise.

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