IAS officer Divya Iyer faces heat for praising CPM leader, Pinarayi comes to her defence

The 2014-batch Kerala cadre IAS officer is married to Congress leader K S Sabarinadhan, a former MLA and son of late Congress veteran G Karthikeyan.

Referring to CPI(M) leader K K Ragesh’s stint as private secretary to the Chief Minister, Iyer had posted on social media: “This KKR ( K K Ragesh) shield is enviable even to Karna (of Mahabharat). As a person who had watched his last three years of official life, there are several virtues which I could copy from his life. He is a textbook of loyalty, an inkwell of hard work. Thank you for always considering us with utmost respect — an art that is getting endangered in power corridors across the globe.’’

As the post triggered online criticism, Vijayan on Wednesday said: “It (the trolling) should be seen as only the chanting of extremely immature minds. Divya is an IAS officer working in the government sector. She had made a public reaction on what she had witnessed. They (Congress) see only the politics of her husband. Their thought, which is part of male dominance, is that she should not adopt a stand different from that of politics. She is being attacked over that thought.”

On Wednesday, Iyer, too, explained her stand through a video: “There are a lot of virtues in others and it is not difficult to find those virtues and share them with others. Now, I am being targeted for having told the world about the virtues which I had found in certain people. Sometimes I am forced to think how strange this world is.”

Although senior Congress legislator and Opposition Leader V D Satheesan refused to criticise her, former MP and senior Congress leader K Muraleedharan said: “There are a few civil service officers who are servile to Pinarayi Vijayan. She is one among them… This flattery will be injurious to her in future.”

Youth Congress state president and MLA Rahul Mamkootathil made a veiled attack on Iyer. “Whoever Karna was, he was on the side of Duryodhana against the side of Dharma until his death… So the question is, who is the greedy Duryodhana here,’’ said Rahul on Facebook.

Youth Congress leader Vijil Mohanan, too, said in a Facebook post that Iyer should remember that she is not paid by the CPI(M) state headquarters.