Muhammed Riyas called it a script. Not a compliment.

The CPM state secretariat member told reporters this week that the Enforcement Directorate has written such a fine screenplay in the CMRL-Exalogic case that whoever drafted it deserves a national award. It was sarcasm aimed squarely at the agency's investigation, but it's landed Riyas in an unusual spot inside his own party.

A section of the CPM is uncomfortable that Riyas keeps meeting the press on this case without routing it through the state secretary. He's now done it twice in quick succession, including a briefing right before a wider state committee meeting wrapped up, where, by most accounts, he added little that was new.

The substance of what he did say was pointed. Riyas rejected reports that Veena, whose name keeps surfacing in the CMRL-Exalogic matter, had admitted to a hawala transaction during ED questioning. That claim, he said, is simply false. Veena has been questioned three times by the ED, according to Riyas, and not one of those sessions touched on hawala dealings. He described the confession story as a fabrication being pushed regardless.

He also took on the WhatsApp group formed in the Beypore constituency, insisting there's nothing unusual about an MLA running one. Development updates, community outreach, the works, he said, adding that anyone can check the actual chat history to see it's mundane. As for the document being circulated as a so-called "red book," Riyas's version is that it was a plan for a future business venture, with no financial transaction tied to it at all.

A locker, some gold, and a sister's claim

The timing is awkward for Riyas because the ED spent part of this week going through a bank locker belonging to a friend of his. The gold found inside, the friend told investigators, belongs to his sister. The agency is reportedly still working through that explanation.

Riyas's broader complaint is that the ED is taking paper trails and turning them into a narrative, his word was script again, to publicly discredit people without real evidence. He pointed out that raids were carried out at the homes and offices of individuals named in Veena's statements to the ED, even though none of them have called the underlying transactions hawala or black money. Getting people to sign off on seized documents during a raid, he argued, is standard procedure and is being repackaged as something closer to a confession.

He framed the pattern as familiar: agencies going after non-BJP leaders under the cover of investigation, aiming for character damage rather than a case that holds up. Riyas said he intends to fight it out legally.

What happens next depends on two separate tracks now running in parallel. One is the ED's own follow-up on the locker and the gold claim. The other is whether the CPM leadership decides Riyas needs to stop holding his own briefings and let the party speak with one voice.