THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The setback in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation where the UDF managed to get only 10 seats from the 100 wards, 11 less than the last time has opened a Pandora’s Box for the KPCC leadership. Senior Congress leader Adoor Prakash, MP, has lashed out against the way in which the two factions shared seats in the local body elections in the Corporation. He told TNIE that if factionalism is rampant then the Congress party itself would be wiped off.
This is the second time the UDF has been pushed to the third place, after BJP’s surprising surge of seats in the 2015 local body polls. Even though the poll debacle was expected in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation by the top brass of the leadership, they never expected such a ‘colossal loss.’ At the review meeting held at Indira Bhavan by the DCC leadership late on Christmas eve, the group managers came out with a deliberate strategy to heap the poll loss blame on the KPCC leadership.
Prominent ‘A’ group leader Palode Ravi maintained that KPCC president Mullappally Ramachandran has been discussing party matters only at the high power Political Affairs Committee meeting where the KPCC general secretaries and vice presidents are not being taken into confidence. Mullappally also faced the brunt of the situation where Palode Ravi allegedly claimed that he remains incommunicado most of the time which left him losing his cool.
It was then that the KPCC leadership realised that there was a concerted move by the campaign managers to deviate the topic from the poll debacle. Attingal MP Adoor Prakash who was entrusted by the KPCC to solve issues, if any, in the 100 wards, ran away from the clutches of the group managers. He recalled to TNIE how V S Sivakumar MLA, M A Vahid and P K Venugopal were engrossed over their phone to KPCC general secretary Thampanoor Ravi who was resting at home due to Covid -19 from 10 am to 2:30 pm. “The interesting fact was that even after four hours these leaders had not zeroed in on a candidate. Then I realised that enough was enough and I left for my home town in Konni.
Interestingly, I chose winnability there and whoever was fielded by me had come up trumps. We could win the Konni, Thannithode and Chittar panchayats and several block panchayats”, said Adoor Prakash who had led Konni for 30 years as a legislator. Even though Adoor Prakash belongs to the ‘I’ group, he has always ensured that he is duty bound to his constituency where the group interests were only secondary. So even after quitting his Konni Assembly seat and becoming the Lok Sabha MP from Attingal, the people in his home town still urges him to return to Konni.
“Only if the party is there, these so called group managers can play petty group politics. I had never asked for a Lok Sabha seat before the party. Only when they sought my permission to contest from either Attingal or Alappuzha, I opted for the former. I don’t have any plans to come back to state politics at this juncture. I am duty bound to Congress party. If the leaders persist on playing group politics, the Congress will be wiped off,” added Adoor Prakash.