Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on Wednesday said he was not aware of any pact made by the Congress with the Nair Service Society and that the party high command had always taken both him and Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee president Ramesh Chennithala into confidence ever since both assumed their respective posts.
Replying to questions at the weekly post-Cabinet press briefing here, Mr. Chandy said he fully subscribed to Mr. Chennithala’s statement regarding the Congress party’s secular tradition. It was for Mr. Chennithala to clarify his statements about a conspiracy to question his secular credentials.
The NSS views have in no way put the Congress party in a fix. He said Mr. Chennithala had expressed the party’s views. His political standing goes back by decades and none can dislodge him from his political space.
As KPCC president, the final word on contesting elections was his and he did not require anyone’s recommendations for a ticket, Mr. Chandy said. Mr. Chandy said he had met Vilasrao Deshmukh, with whom the NSS claims to have made a pact, several times since, but he had not made a mention of this. He did not view that the NSS general secretary was against him. “Perhaps, it was just an issue of lack of communication,” he said.
With regard to the SNC-Lavalin case, Mr. Chandy felt that the law should take its own course. It was the court that had asked the CBI to take up the investigation, he said, asserting that the UDF had never approached the case politically.
