V D Satheesan, K C Venugopal Turn on Journalists Over Wayanad Fund Questions at UDF Manifesto Launch

Thiruvananthapuram: Opposition Leader V D Satheesan and Congress leader K C Venugopal came under sharp public criticism after they responded with hostility to media questions about funds collected for Wayanad disaster relief at the UDF's election manifesto launch, failing to provide any clear accounting of the money raised.

When a journalist raised the question of the Wayanad funds, Satheesan directed that the reporter's microphone be taken away, insisting that only questions related to the manifesto would be entertained at the event. He accused journalists of deliberately provoking him into an angry exit. Venugopal, for his part, adopted a similarly combative tone when asked whether the Congress had a moral obligation to disclose the details of the funds it had collected, deflecting the question and asking why journalists were not raising questions about medicine distribution instead. He also tried to deflect by saying that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had also similarly lost his temper with the media.

The evasive and aggressive responses from both leaders have come to be seen as an admission of the party's inability to provide a transparent account of the relief funds. Congress had earlier attempted to shift the focus to funds collected by DYFI, demanding that those figures be made public first — but once DYFI released a detailed accounting of every rupee it had collected, the Congress leadership fell silent, leaving itself without a credible counter-argument.

The episode took a further turn during a television debate, when a Congress representative alleged that the CPI(M) central committee had misappropriated funds raised for Wayanad — a charge to which the CPI(M) responded within half an hour by placing the complete financial details on record, leaving the Congress leadership once again in an embarrassing position.