Thiruvananthapuram, Union Minister of State for External Affairs V. Muraleedharan expressed concern in the manner in which Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan went ahead and appointed a Judicial Commission to probe the action taken by the Enforcement Directorate officials to pressurise two prime accused in the gold smuggling case to confess against Vijayan.

The government orders for the new judicial probe came out the other day and this probe was announced before the Assembly polls.

It will be headed by Justice (rtd) V.K. Mohan and the terms of reference also have been given.

Muraleedharan wrote in a Facebook post that if this is the way things are going to be taken forward by Vijayan, which is an attack on the federal structure, then it's not going to be looking good.

"If Vijayan is resorting to such things in the wake of the electoral victory, then things will not be looking good. It's using public money that Vijayan has appointed this Commission and that too to probe the events that took place under his government. He should think that apart from wasting public money there will be no good as there are numerous Commission reports which has not seen the light of the day and hence wasting public money during the present bad times does not augur good," said Muraleedharan.

Incidentally this new move comes at a time when in April, Vijayan suffered a setback after the Kerala High Court quashed the two FIRs registered against the Enforcement Directorate officials by the Crime Branch unit of Kerala police in the very same case.

The premise of this judicial probe is based on a complaint by two women police officials that they were allegedly being pressurised to testify that the gold smuggling case accused Swapna Suresh was coerced into giving statements implicating Vijayan in the case.

According to the two women police officials, who were providing security to Swapna Suresh, when under judicial custody, that they had heard of the ED pressurising her to name Vijayan.

Incidentally when Vijayan went about this by registering a case by the Crime Branch and the then announced judicial probe Union Ministers including Home Minister Amit Shah, Nirmala Sitharaman among others had slammed such move by the Kerala government.