Row over letter leak: CPI(M) gears up to counter Congress-BJP ‘slander campaign’ against top leadership in Kerala

In the wake of a leaked letter purportedly addressed to its Polit Bureau, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] in Kerala seemed poised to politically counter the Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “campaign”, accusing top party leaders and their relatives of financial collusion with a UK-based businessperson from the State. 

In New Delhi, CPI(M) Kerala State secretary M.V. Govindan declined to comment on whether the Polit Bureau had received a confidential letter detailing the alleged financial nexus. “Absurd questions do not merit answers”, he said. 

Mr. Govindan ignored insistent questions about whether the media leak of the controversial document signalled divisions within the CPI(M)‘s State leadership. 

The UK-based person’s business partner-turned-rival had triggered a political controversy on Sunday (August 17, 2025) by claiming he had sent the letter confidentially to the Polit Bureau, and implicated the next of kin of a top leader for leaking the missive to his opponent to help the latter in a libel suit.

The complaint emerged in the public domain somewhat sensationally after the NRI businessperson adduced as evidence in a defamatory suit filed by him against his business rival and some sections of the media in a Delhi court, for allegedly broadcasting that the CPI(M) had thrown him out of the venue of the party congress in Madurai in April 2025. 

Document ‘inconsequential’, says Sivankutty

V. Sivankutty, Kerala’s General Education Minister and CPI(M) State Committee member, said the Congress and the BJP were using the “inconsequential” document as if it were empirical evidence to malign the Kerala government and the CPI(M) ahead of the local body polls later this year and the Assembly elections in 2026.

Mr. Sivankutty stated that both parties have taken a page from the playbook they had used in the 2016 and 2021 Assembly elections to run a defamatory campaign against the CPI(M), its top leaders, and their families.

Instead of making solid manifesto commitments on social welfare, employment and development, the Congress and the BJP, he stated, were again laying down a smokescreen of lies and ludicrous conspiracy theories in the vain hope that it would yield them rich dividends at the hustings in 2026.

He said such slanderous campaigns against CPI(M) leaders would intensify, given the “inevitability of a third Pinarayi Vijayan government.”

“The CPI(M) leadership will weigh the matter and provide the public clarity”, he added.