The CPM is facing uneasy questions over the decision to omit two battle-hardened ministers from the list of candidates for the Kerala Assembly elections, with its justification that MLAs who have completed consecutive terms should make way for fresh faces failing to smother speculation. Finance minister T.M. Thomas Isaac, an economist with a doctorate, and public works minister G. Sudhakaran are both popular and affable leaders with a clean image and CPM bulwarks in Alappuzha district for about two decades. Their relationship with chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan that has raised tantalising questions in party circles. Isaac had famously snapped at the vigilance department’s raid on the Kerala State Financial Enterprises Ltd in December. “I don’t know whose mad idea is this,” he had lamented when vigilance officials had searched the KSFE premises.