Thiruvananthapuram: A P Abdullakutty who had put out a Facebook post on May 28 extolling prime miniter Narendra Modi's “Gandhian values” has been expelled from the Congress party on Monday. KPCC president Mullappally Ramachandran said that it was in a tone of mockery that Abdullakutty had responded to even the show cause notice sent to him. “Further, he seems to be in no mood to rein in the defamatory statements he has been making through the media, especially against top Congress leaders,” the KPCC chief said in a brief media statement here on Monday.
Abdullakutty, on his part, said he would stick to his pro-Modi stand. “Time will prove me right,” he said. A decade ago, in 2009, it was Abdullakutty's praise of Modi's Gujarat model of developed that saw him booted out of the CPM. “Ten years ago, the CPM had thrown me out when I spoke of development. See where they stand on development now. Comrade Pinarayi Vijayan now speaks of express highway and he is the biggest champion of GAIL pipeline,” he said.
Abdullakutty had in his May 28 post said that the secret of Modi's success was that he had successfully adopted Gandhian philosophy as his political strategy. “Gandhi had told his followers to recall the face of the poorest when you devise a policy. Modi did exactly that through his Swach Bharat and Ujjwal Yojana schemes,” Abdulakkutty said.
Nonetheless, Abdullakutty did not say whether he would join the BJP. “At this moment, I am not in a mental state to think of such things,”Abdullakutty told reporters in Kannur minutes aftrer he was expelled.
It very much looked like Abdullakutty was instigating the Congress leadership to take action against him. He had even expressed mock amusement at the commission that was set up by the KPCC president to do a formal enquiry into his pro-Modi utterances. “I thought a local level Congress leader was better suited to deal with someone like me who is nothing in the party,” Abdullakutty said.
Incidentally, Abdullakutty, who rose up the ranks through the SFI, began his stint in politics by dealing Mullappally Ramachandran back to back failures in Kannur, in 1999 and 2004. After he was kicked out of the CPM, he joined the Congress and won the Kannur Assembly seat in 2009 (in a by-election) and repeated the feat in 2011. However, in 2016, he lost to CPM's A M Shamseer in Thalassery.
“I was the only sitting MLA who was asked to move out of my seat during the last Assembly polls,” Abdullakutty said, hinting that he was being gradually sidelined in the party. He also charged Congress leader K Sudhakaran with conspiring to destroy him politically. “If I had still managed to hold on, it was because of the love of ordinary Congress workers and the people of Kannur,” Abdullakutty said.
