Revolting against the party leadership over the selection of the new DCC president, 12 District Congress Committee (DCC) office-bearers belonging to the ‘I’ group here resigned from their posts on Saturday.
Apparently irked by the AICC decision to appoint O Abdul Rahmankutty of the ‘A’ group as the DCC president, 12 out of the total 21 office-bearers in the DCC, including vice-president C N Govindankutty and treasurer P K Abubacker Haji, tendered their resignations to outgoing DCC chief V Balram.
Others who resigned are general secretaries Vincent Kattukaran, M K Abdul Salam, A S Velayudhan, M V Kurien, A R Radhakrishnan, Saramma Mathappan, Sunil Anthikadu, M S Anilkumar, Jose Vallur and Joseph Challisserry.
Earlier, a KPCC meeting in Thiruvananthapuram, in the presence of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, decided to go ahead with the AICC list without any changes.
“We quit the party posts in order to register our protest over the appointment of Abdul Rahmankutty. But this does not mean that we all have quit the party,” said Joseph Challisserry. M P Bhaskaran Nair, who chaired an ‘I’ group meeting in the evening, said the block-level office-bearers would resign in the next phase. Therambil Ramakrishnan MLA, M P Vincent MLA and Mayor I P Paul were also present at the meeting.
The discontentment in the ‘I’ group came to the fore after the AICC nominated Abdurahman Kutty, close to P C Chacko MP, as the DCC president.
Following this, the ‘I’ group leaders had organised a parallel convention here and sent a letter to the AICC seeking reinstatement of Balram as the DCC chief.
There were reports that the DCC president’s post was given to the ‘A’ group, after a gap of 32 years at the insistence of Chacko in exchange of Kannur DCC chief’s post being given to the ‘I’ faction led by K Sudhakaran, MP.
