Communist Party of India (CPI) Secretary D. Raja has said the recent statement of Congress leader and United Democratic Front (UDF) candidate in the Wayanad constituency Rahul Gandhi against Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan is immature and baseless.
Addressing the media in Wayanad on April 20 (Saturday) Mr. Raja said Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and All India Congress Committee general secretary K.C. Venugopal should advise Mr. Gandhi to withdraw his statement inviting the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to arrest Mr. Vijayan.
At a time when a sharp protest was taking place across the country against the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren, such a statement from a national leader like Mr. Gandhi was quite unfortunate, Mr. Raja said.
Though Mr. Gandhi was a Prime Minister candidate in 2019, he was not the PM candidate of the INDIA bloc in the forthcoming election, Mr. Raja said. The bloc was constituted mainly to end the BJP rule in the country, but it was yet to present Mr. Gandhi as a PM candidate, he added.
On how the block would join hands with a national leader like Mr. Gandhi, who demanded the arrest of a Chief Minister belonging to the same bloc, after the election, the CPI leader said it was constituted with a wider perspective.
On why the CPI joined hands with the Congress at the Centre and fought each other in Kerala, Mr. Raja said the fight in Kerala was between the LDF and the UDF, not the NDA and the INDIA bloc.
“The NDA leaders are now focusing on south India since they suspected that there would be a change in government and they would lose power in north India,” Mr. Raja added.
