The Indian Marxists are not particularly fond of Arvind Kejriwal or his Aam Aadmi Party for obvious reasons but CPI(M)’s nonagenarian Central committee member and Kerala Assembly’s Opposition leader VS Achuthanandan on Monday ‘used’ that party’s election symbol jhadu (broom) to warn scam-tainted Congress Chief Minister Oommen Chandy.
Achuthanandan, who faxed a congratulatory note to Kejriwal for his party’s stunning performance in the Delhi election without seeking his party’s clearance, asked Chandy to step down as Chief Minister “before our women wield the jhadu, which the AAP used to sweep away the corrupt in Delhi,” against him.
Inaugurating a protest march organised by the CPI(M)-led Opposition lDF to Cliff House, the Chief Minister’s official residence in Thiruvananthapuram, demanding his resignation over the infamous solar scam, Achuthanandan said that people here would wield the broom that the AAP used to sweep away Sheila Dikshit’s corrupt regime if Chandy did not resign on his own.
Achuthanandan alleged that Kerala was being ruled by a black company run by Chandy, Home Minister Thiruvanchoor, con woman Saritha S Nair and her former husband Biju Radhakrishnan, both perpetrators of the solar scam. “This agitation would not stop until Chandy resigns and a fair probe is ordered into the scam,” he said.
The Opposition is accusing Chandy of directly helping Saritha and Biju to use the Chief Minister’s office as their operational base for which some of his former aides had acted as the their associates. The scam pertains to the duping of many people of several crores of rupees with the promise to install solar power projects for them.
Deputy Opposition leader in the Assembly and CPI(M) Politburo member Kodiyeri Balakrishnan also brought in the name Kejriwal, though the party was still not clear about what its exact approach should be towards the AAP phenomenon, by asking Chandy and the Congress in Kerala to bear in mind how Sheila Dikshit was unseated.
However, the fax message sent by Achuthanandan to Kejriwal congratulating him over his party’s success in the Delhi Assembly election is sure to create problems within the CPI(M) especially when the party was viewing the AAP policy, politics and programmes with suspicion, according to sources.
In the fax, Achuthanandan asked Kejriwal to carry on with his party’s struggle against corruption. CPI(M) sources said that the party was likely to consider Achuthanandan’s act seriously especially as the AAP was planning to extend its work to the grassroots in Kerala ahead of the lok Sabha election which was expected to be detrimental to the Marxists’ interests.
The AAP’s victory in Delhi has already caused murmurs of complaint among the Marxist youth and grassroots against the top CPI(M) leadership. Critics are pointing out that many of AAP’s seats in Delhi had come from areas where the poor and the working class people lived and this showed the failure of the communists in taking up their cause.
Meanwhile, sources in the AAP said that the party was planning to expand its base in the grassroots level in South Indian States including Kerala before the lok Sabha polls. They said the response to these efforts in Kerala had been overwhelming and that there had already been considerable increase in number of followers.
AAP sources said that the party’s policies were sure to have a lot of takers in Kerala where the “Congress-led ruling UDF and CPI(M)-led Opposition lDF are playing politics of hypocrisy on issues like illegal mining, conservation of the Western Ghats eco-system and fight against corruption” in high places.