Kanyakumari Congress MP Vijay Vasanth has complained to police that his pen worth Rs 1.50 lakh had been missing since he participated in an event at a Chennai hotel where the Opposition’s presidential candidate, Yashwant Sinha, met MLAs and MPs of the DMK-led alliance in Tamil Nadu on June 30 to seek their support. In his complaint lodged with the Guindy police on Tuesday, Vasanth said the lost pen was a Montblanc fountain pen, which he had inherited from his late father, H Vasantha Kumar, who was the MP for Kanyakumari. Speaking to indianexpress.com, Vasanth said the pen had been very special to him and that was the reason he opted to file a police complaint. “Appa (Vasantha Kumar) had been using it, and ever since his demise, I have used the pen. It has been close to two years now. I participated in the event in Guindy at a hotel and I had the pen with me then. When I checked later, it was not there. The event had only Congress and alliance party members, so there was no chance of outsiders coming in. It must have fallen from the pocket as there was a heavy rush. I raised the issue with the hotel authorities and asked them to check CCTV footage, but they said they could do so only after a complaint is made,” he said. Vasanth said he believed the police would recover it soon. “Many media outlets reported that I had lodged a complaint claiming the pen had been stolen, which is not true. I had filed a missing complaint only. I am keeping my fingers crossed and hope the pen will return to me soon,” he said. Vasanth was elected from the Kanyakumari Lok Sabha constituency in May 2021 in a bypoll that was necessitated after Vasanthakumar, his father and founder of one the state’s biggest retail chains-Vasanth and Co-died of Covid in 2020.
