Kerala chief minister and CPM leader Pinarayi Vijayan’s invitation to Union home minister Amit Shah to be the chief guest at the renowned boat race named after Jawaharlal Nehru during the Onam festival has drawn charges of double standard.
The invitation has been extended at a time the Left Front government in Kerala has been courting one controversy after another in quick succession and in the middle of a battle with governor Arif Mohammed Khan, termed by the CPM itself as a puppet of the BJP-run Centre.
The state CPM has all along been a staunch critic of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine and has in the past vilified the opposition Congress-led United Front for even remotely associating with the duo. The CPM had in the past expelled a two-time party MP for praising the Gujarat model.
Amit Shah. File picture
The gesture of the chief minister apparently bypasses the decision of the steering committee that conducts the race to invite celluloid veteran Kamal Haasan to be the chief guest.
Shah will be in Kerala to chair the South Zone Council meeting on September 3. Besides Vijayan, the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry are scheduled to attend the meeting.
By Saturday evening, the public relations department of the state government issued a media release saying all
the five chief ministers and Shah have been invited to the boat race. But it was silent on the chief minister’s letter to the Union home minister, inviting him to be the chief guest.
The traditional boat race for the Nehru Trophy will be held on September 4 after a Covid-induced gap of two years. The race at the Punnamada Lake in Alappuzha, once known as the Venice of the East, was first inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952.
The Kerala Tourism website recounts: “He (Nehru) was so enchanted by the sight of the majestic snake boats that he leapt onto one of the snake boats himself, ignoring his security cover.”
In 2019, just before the general election, when UDF partner and Revolutionary Socialist Party leader N.K. Premachandran, who represents Kollam in the Lok Sabha, invited the Prime Minister to inaugurate a National Highway bypass, Vijayan and the CPM had launched a campaign against the MP.
Premachandran was termed a “Sanghi”, a derogatory way of referring to anyone with Sangh parivar connections.
During the UDF regime of 2011-16, when the then labour minister Shibu Baby John had met the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for 10 minutes while on a visit to the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Vijayan, then state CPM secretary, had demanded the resignation of Shibu from the Oommen Chandy cabinet.
On Saturday, leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan asked what prompted Vijayan to invite Shah to be the chief guest at the boat race. “Vijayan should clarify whether it is the gold smuggling case or the SNC Lavalin case (in which the chief minister is one of the accused is coming up before the Supreme Court on September 13. The other courts had cleared Vijayan.) that prompted him to invite Shah for the event. Several incidents are happening in Kerala which justify the UDF’s charges that there is an unholy alliance between the CPM and the BJP. The CPM should clarify its opportunistic stand,” Satheesan said.
Satheesan alleged that the CPM and the BJP were working in tandem to’ eliminate Congress from Kerala.
Recently, various financial irregularities have come up in many cooperative societies run by the CPM and other parties in the state. Shah is also in charge of the newly created ministry for cooperatives and had been promising to get politicians out of cooperative societies.
