I was not Congress’s CM face in 2021 Assembly polls: Ramesh Chennithala

Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 9 (PTI) Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala on Monday said he was not the Chief Ministerial candidate of the party-led UDF in the 2021 Assembly polls.

Chennithala said this in response to Nair Service Society (NSS) general secretary G Sukumaran Nair’s reported allegations that the UDF lost the 2021 Assembly polls because he was projected as the Chief Ministerial candidate.

“Neither the UDF nor the Congress party projected anyone as the Chief Ministerial candidate in the last assembly elections. The approach taken by the party and the front in the State was that the elected MLAs will decide the Chief Minister after the election,” Chennithala told reporters here.

Once considered close to the NSS and Sukumaran Nair, Chennithala also sought to distance himself from the outfit and its leader, saying he belongs to the Congress party which always upholds a secular position.

“For the past 45 years, I have upheld that secular stance in public and personal life. So I will always be a part of secularism. There is no question of going back from it. I have always been a Congressman and the Congress Party is the biggest for me,” said Chennithala, who was the Leader Of Opposition in the State Assembly during the previous Left government’s period.

The NSS leadership had claimed that Chennithala was appointed as State Home Minister in 2013 after Sukumaran Nair stated that the UDF will lose the Assembly polls if a person from the Hindu community is not given a position equivalent to that of the Chief Minister in the then Oommen Chandy-led government.

The Congress leader said he was brought up politically by his party and all positions he held in his political life were gifted by it.

The Congress-led alliance had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Assembly polls held in the 2021 which saw the CPI(M)-led LDF rewriting the history in Kerala by becoming the first government to get a second term in four decades.

Meanwhile, Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the State Assembly, V D Satheesan, played down Sukumaran Nair’s statement, saying the opposition will be criticised as much as the government is criticised.

He said he has no intolerance towards such criticism.

Satheesan said it cannot be said that the community organisations should not criticise the political leadership.

Noting that he has criticised the community organisations before, the Congress leader said he will continue to do so if such a situation arises.

He also said both the majority communalism and minority communalism will be strongly opposed.

Besides Chennithala, Satheesan and AICC general secretary K C Venugopal, all belonging to the Nair community, were once considered very close to the NSS leadership.

The relationship strained later, and it further deepened after the outfit started throwing its weight behind Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, who began to assert his position in Kerala politics post AICC presidential election in which he had lost to Congress veteran Mallikarjun Kharge.

It was Tharoor who inaugurated NSS founder-leader Mannathu Padmanabhan’s 146th Jayanthi celebration on January 2 at the NSS headquarters at Perunna in Kottayam district.