Thiruvananthapuram: The CPM is desperate to establish that the scandal around what it calls a "transparent and legal" CMRL-Exalogic deal originated from a political conspiracy to destabilise the party. "It is just a political conspiracy and nothing else," CPM state secretary M V Govindan said on Friday.

But when critical questions were asked about the deal, the state secretary came up with vague, even weird responses. "Is it morally justifiable for the Chief Minister's daughter to enter into a deal with a company (CMRL) in which a government body (KSIDC) has a share (13.4%)?" he was asked.

Early this week, CPM general secretary M A Baby had evaded the question. But Govindan was blunt. Neither did he shy away from the question, nor did he employ theoretical bombast to make his response seem neither here nor there. "What is the problem with morals here?" he shot back. "This (CMRL) is not a government company, but a private company. The government has shares, not in one or two, but in innumerable private companies. And these are not majority stakes either. So there is no need to suffer from any moral angst," Govindan dismissed the poser.

Since this was not convincing enough, the 'moral burden' question was hurled at him once again. And this time he was provoked. His response could be read either as a sign of his thinking getting abruptly muddled or as a quick-witted leader's attempt to deliberately complicate the argument. "What morals are you speaking about. Feudal morals?" he said. The state secretary flashed back to the time when the communist party fought landlordism. He was cross-matching the party's current plight to its celebrated period in the 1950s. It was the subtle equivalent of a fighter past his prime boasting of his past exploits. 

Still, trying to wish away the moral question, Govindan sounded a bit self-defeating, too. "You don't have to apply your moral standards to the rest of society," he told the questioner. Was he unwittingly conceding that the CPM marched to an in-house moral code that was separate from the one that applied to ordinary mortals? 

Govindan then seemed to suggest that the entire debate around morals should be repelled, as if it were a Brahmanical conspiracy. "Now there is a big brouhaha over another kind of morality. Sanatana Dharma. That is not a 'dharma' that we approve of. It is feudal morality. It is the morality of the Brahmanical order. Do you have any idea how the landlord behaved with the tenant?" he said. 

Govindan, in short, was trying to reimagine a petty corruption charge involving the CM's daughter into a revolutionary class war. Feudal tyranny now returning in the form of the Sangh Parivar witch-hunt.

Then, there was the other big question. What is the service that Veena and her company, Exalogic, claimed to have provided? "This has to be settled between the two parties (CMRL and Veena) involved," Govindan said. He served yet another logic. "When the company (CMRL) and the service provider (Exalogic) have no complaints, why would anyone want to probe their deal?" he said. Suppose two parties, say an individual and a hired goon, collude to commit an illegal act. Just because both have no complaints against each other, will their actions cease to be a crime? In CPM's moral code, perhaps it will. 

There was a third question. Will the party probe how Exalogic used the party state committee office as its official address? "You are worried about the address, isn't it? We will look into it. Don't worry. Till now we have not done it but we will examine it now," he said, making fun of the question. "The company itself does not exist and you want us to check its horoscope," he waved away the question with contempt.