Siren, victim, vamp, whistleblower …

It is a common enough story in Kerala. A bright, sharp-tongued young girl from a lower middle class family learns early in life how to negotiate hardships when her father, burdened by debt, kills himself. She gets through school with great grades but is married off at 18.
Divorced nine years later, Saritha Nair then starts working as a share broker at a private bank in Kozhencherry.She cheats her employer of Rs 2 lakh, and then falls in love with Biju, a man who would later turn out to be a hardened criminal. This is where the story of Saritha’s transformation starts — from a small-time cheat to a Jezebel-like figure who has brought an entire government to its knees with a flurry of allegations of sexual abuse and corruptions against top Congress leaders of the leading UDF regime and several other VIPs.
On Malayalam news channels, where Saritha has been a fixture for over two years, she appears as demure and matronly, head bowed, long hair pinned back, the sindoor and pious chandan in place. Nothing here of the siren of the many sex tapes allegedly in circulation on the internet and social media. But she is still sensational, certainly her disclosures are. Every day, Malayalees wait with bated breath for the next round of audio and video tapes of her “closeness” to people in power.
The infamous ‘solar scam’, in which Saritha and Biju allegedly swindled investors and customers of crores, is currently being probed by a judicial panel. In the beginning it was the minions, then the VIPs and top politicos who Saritha named as obliging friends in high places. Then came the allegations against chief minister Oommen Chandy’s cabinet colleagues.
The solar heat is now on the chief minister himself. Saritha has alleged that she gave Rs.1.90 crore in bribes to Chandy in two instalments through his aide. And on Friday, she claimed to a daily that she had unfettered access to the Chandy home and its family members — “the kind of freedom to enter another person’s kitchen” as she put it.
So entrenched is Saritha’s story as a bold, brassy, over-achieving woman in popular imagination that it is set to become a movie. The title says it all —Vaiyyaveli (someone who spells trouble). The trailer, featuring Saritha doing some choreographed jhatkas, is grabbing eyeballs by the thousands. Saritha’s mother Indira says that her daughter’s downfall was destined the day she met Biju. The year was 2004.
Between 2008 and 2010, 16 cases of cheating and fraud were registered against the duo for offering fake loans to businessmen. “Saritha and Biju were a strange and dangerous duo. Saritha was manipulative and Biju was a born criminal,” says IGP MR Ajithkumar, who arrested the couple in 2010 for fraud.
In an otherwise conservative and patriarchal society, Saritha appears to have put off a lot of people with her disregard for norms. When she was studying for her applied electronics diploma, Saritha’s classmates recall seeing her always in the “company of men”. “She gave a great deal of importance to the way she looked, applying makeup every day,” says one.
A Congress leader who didn’t want to be named reinforces popular notion about Saritha’s lethal charms. “Nothing can stop her if she is determined to use you,” he rues. Politicians call her a blackmailer who extorts money from high-profile victims. Chandy who had once sneered: “Who will believe Saritha?” must be regretting the casual disdain with which he once dismissed the scam.
Time and time again Saritha herself has complained that her leaked sex tapes were used to swing public attention away from the issue of corruption and refocus it on her “morality”. “The financial allegations that will someday surface are now being smoke-screened by my alleged immorality. This is partly my fault,” she said at a court hearing in Kochi on January 29.
Saritha had initially hesitated to come forward with the entire truth and withdrew crucial information, like the 30-page letter she had written in jail only four pages of which she submitted in 2013. She had, she said, omitted the names of 13 VIPs and a police officer. She then resubmitted the entire letter in court earlier this week. There are now endless discussions and debates on her motives and strategies. Through all this, only the key figure in the drama seems to know where the muddled plot is headed.