Communist Party of India (CPI) national executive committee member K.E. Ismail has backed the CPI (M) State secretary Pinarayi Vijayan in the present controversy around Mr. Vijayan’s alleged coarse remark on N.K. Premachandran, the UDF candidate in Kollam.
In a media interaction programme ‘Dilli Chalo,’ organised by the Calicut Press Club in connection with the Lok Sabha election here on Monday, Mr. Ismail supported Mr. Vijayan saying Mr. Premachandran deserved even stronger words considering the way he ditched the front. “In fact Mr. Vijayan should have used even stronger expressions,” he said.
Reiterating that Mr. Premachandran and his party (RSP) were acting based on a “clear script” prepared in advance, Mr. Ismail said his act was more heinous than the act of the Biblical character Judas, who betrayed Jesus Christ for a few silver coins.
“If it was only a question of a seat in Parliament, they could very well have waited and got it by claiming a Rajya Sabha seat after raising the issue in the LDF meeting,” said Mr. Ismail, suggesting that the “indecent haste” shown by the RSP in the entire episode was “clear proof” for their complicity in the prior plot to quit the front.
Ruling out the allegation that Bennet Abraham, the LDF candidate in the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in the Lok Sabha election, was a candidate on “payment seat” he said Mr. Abraham might not have had the details of his constituency offhand like a typical politician, to counter the arguments of his political opponents.
“But that alone is not the eligibility for someone to be elected to Parliament,” said Mr. Ismail. Stating that the party (CPI) was not for destroying the self-financing sector of education, he maintained that it was only certain policies of the self-financing managements that the party had opposed vehemently.
Asked about the criticisms levelled by political commentator and CPI’s lawyers forum leader M. Jayasankar against the candidature of Dr. Bennet Abraham, the CPI leader said Mr. Jayasankar was talking about things that he had no clue of. “The party has asked him not to make comments on things that he had no knowledge of,” he said.
Criticising the media for indefinitely “hunting” the CPI(M) and thus the LDF in the name of the Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrashekharan’s murder, Mr. Ismail said no murder was “celebrated” by the media as fervently as the murder of Mr. Chandrashekharan. This, according to him, was part of a conspiracy to destroy the Left parties in the State.
He also said the allegation against A.N. Shamseer, the LDF candidate at the Vadakara Lok Sabha constituency, of having made phone calls to Kirmani Manoj, one of the convicts in the Chandrashekharan murder case, was only an election stunt. “Those who made it will withdraw it soon,” he said.
