The Left Democratic Front (LDF) government has pushed back on actor Jayasurya’s accusation that youth took a bleak view of agriculture as a chosen line of work given the government’s “high-profile failure” to pay off the outsize debt owed to impoverished paddy farmers.
Mr. Jayasurya’s controversial statement aired at a public function attended by Agriculture Minister P. Prasad and Law Minister P. Rajeeve in Kochi on Thursday had triggered a social media storm.
He also said farmers who fed Kerala starved during Onam, which some quarters construed as a barbed and patently false anti-government remark.
The statements lent the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ammunition to assail the government in the run-up to the Puthuppally Assembly byelection scheduled for September 5.
LDF convener E.P. Jayarajan countered the acquisitions on Friday. He said artistes were social influencers in some measure. Hence, they should anchor their opinions in truth and not parrot calumnious anti-Left propaganda spawned by the Congress and the Sangh Parivar.
Actors should realise that Left progressive forces spearheaded the iconic agrarian movements that emancipated farmers. He said farmers’ welfare lay passionately close to the LDF’s heart.
Mr. Jayarajan said artistes of certain political ilk were silent about the Centre’s whittling of agriculture subsidies and paddy procurement payments to States, including Kerala.
Mr. Prasad also launched a broadside against the actor. He said Mr. Jayasurya anchored his imputations on the dubious version given by an actor-friend who was a staunch BJP supporter. He said Mr. Jayasurya had a definite political agenda that was viscerally anti-Left.
Mr. Prasad said the government underwrote the interest for payment made by a nationalised bank to paddy farmers. The government was the guarantor and not the farmer, as suggested by Mr. Jayasurya’s “BJP friend”.
He noted the actor was “strangely silent” about the plight of small-scale rubber farmers in his native place.
Mr. Jayasurya conveniently glossed over the fact that the ASEAN pact signed by the Congress-led Manmohan Singh government in 2009 and pursued by the BJP-led Central government had pushed the price of home-grown rubber to a pathetic low, Mr. Prasad alleged.
He said Mr. Jayasurya seemed not mindful that the BJP and earlier the Congress aided tyre manufacturing corporates by ignoring farmers’ pleas to hike the base price of rubber.
Mr. Prasad said he would reveal more about Mr. Jayasurya’s political agenda in the coming days.
