On Monday, foul-mouthed Poonjar MLA PC George held a press meet in Kerala on the controversy surrounding the abduction and assault of an actor in February.
George, known to be a Dileep sympathiser, earned much ire when he questioned the survivor in a press meet held earlier this week. The MLA with very less grasping power asked why the woman went back to work ‘a day after she was raped’.
PC George asked how the survivor could have gone to work the next day if she had been assaulted more brutally than 'Nirbhaya,' as the prosecution had argued in court.
In his effort to blame the Kerala police for trapping Dileep, PC George had compared the case to the infamous ISRO spy scandal of 1994.
“Shameless beggars the Kerala police are. They took money from CIA spies and jailed a big scientist like Nambi Narayanan for four years. Supreme Court asked them to give Rs 1 crore to him. I was the one who saw his tears. I went to his house and gave Rs 10 lakh. He told me, ‘PC, just give me Rs 10 lakh, only so that people know I have been compensated.’ Oommen Chandy asked me to give the money, I took the cheque to his house,” George narrated.
PC George then emphatically told reporters to go ask Nambi Narayanan what the truth was.
And that’s exactly what Asianet’s Executive Editor Vinu V John did. In his show ‘News Hour’, Vinu asked Nambi Narayanan for his version and PC George’s elaborate exaggerations were busted.
Bursting PC George’s bubble, the scientist said that he had been jailed for 50 days and not 4 years as George said.
“Supreme Court has not asked police to pay Rs 1 crore to me. SC only asked government to pay Rs 1 lakh to 6 of us as legal costs, not as compensation. I have filed a case asking for Rs 1 crore as defamation. In 2001, National Human Rights Commission asked the Kerala government to pay me Rs 10 lakh. But the government obtained a stay, and it was only 11 years later that the stay was vacated,” Nambi Narayanan said.
He added that it was a police constable who came to his house to give the cheque and not PC George.
PC George, who was listening to this conversation said that Nambi Narayanan had visited him asking him to help with getting the compensation. Nambi Narayanan once again disagreed, and said that he had met PC George only after he received the compensation, and discussed the defamation case with him.
But George was not ready to back down. He claimed that since Nambi Narayanan was old, his memory was failing.
On October 20, 1994 the Kerala police arrested a Maldivian woman named Mariam Rasheeda on charges of overstaying in India after her visa expired. Soon, the visa case metamorphosed into the biggest sex-spy scandal of the country, implicating two senior ISRO scientists, two businessmen and two women. The scientists and businessmen were accused of selling ISRO's cryogenic programme secrets to the women who were allegedly acting as spies for Russia, ISI and others.
One of the accused was Nambi Narayanan, a top scientist at ISRO, who has since fought a long, lonely battle against the mighty state to prove his innocence.