In an incident allegedly indicative of the collapse of the law and order system in Kerala under the CPI(M)-led lDF Government, the State committee office of the BJP in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram, came under a bomb attack at midnight on Tuesday.
Nobody was injured in the explosion caused by a crude bomb hurled at the party office.
The BJP leadership alleged that CPI(M) workers were behind the bomb attack. They also expressed the suspicion that top leaders of the State party unit, including its president Kummanam Rajasekharan, could have been the target of the attack. The Marxist party rejected the allegation against it.
The attack on the BJP office in a new building at Kunnukuzhi, Thiruvananthapuram took place shortly after Kummanam Rajasekharan had left for Kozhikode, where preparations were on for the three-day national council meeting of the party to be held from September 23, in which senior leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate.
Alleging that the CPI(M) had a clear role in the bomb attack on the party office, Rajasekharan said, "The situation in Kerala is such that no party other than the CPI(M) can carry out political activities." The CPI(M) had taken law into its hands and violent incidents had become frequent and widespread, he said in Kozhikode on Wednesday.
In Delhi, senior BJP leader and Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman condemned the attack saying, "We suspect that this attack was an attack on the (State party) president himself." She said nobody would believe the CPI(M)'s denials unless the lDF Government did not allow an independent investigation to take place.
The BJP will observe Thursday as Black Day in the State in protest against the attack. The party took out a protest march to the State Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday morning. National executive member PK Krishnadas, who led the march, said the attack on the party office could not be seen as an isolated incident.
"We don't think that this was an attack merely on the party office. We suspect that this was part of an attempt to attack senior leaders including the State president," said Krishnadas. Several incidents of vandalizing posters and flags of the BJP had taken place in the capital recently. The police said search had been intensified for those behind the bomb attack.
The incident took place close on the heels of a series of clashes between the CPI(M) and the BJP-RSS in northern Kannur district. At least three persons looking after the affairs of the party office were inside it when the explosion took place. Though nobody was injured in the attack, the glass panes at the main entrance had shattered in the explosion.
Those who were in the office at the time of the attack said the bomb was hurled by bike-riding persons. CCTV footage, recorded by a surveillance system installed in a nearby building, showed a man on motorbike passing by the party office around Tuesday midnight. However, the face of the bike-rider was not clear from the video.
The police launched a search for the miscreants. The BJP State committee office, which was functioning at the State party headquarters, Mararji Bhavan at Thampanoor presently undergoing renovation, was shifted to the newly constructed two-floor rented building at Kunnukuzhi just before the Assembly election in May.
"In present-day Kerala, CPI(M) is equal to violence. The advantages of law are available to the CPI(M) only. Marxists have taken the law into their hands and the police have turned into a mere scarecrow," Rajasekharan said, adding that Marxist Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan was not even willing to condemn incidents of violence.
The CPI(M), however, denied having any role in the bomb attack and rejected the BJP charge terming it as baseless. "The incident is highly condemnable. The anti-social elements behind the attack should be arrested at the earliest," said CPI(M)'s Thiruvananthapuram district secretary Anavoor Nagappan.