CPI on Monday kept off an LDF delegation that visited CPM leader P. Jayarajan in Kannur jail, signalling a widening rift between the two left parities.
Criticising the CPI stand, CPM leader Pinarayi Vijayan wanted to know what exactly was CPI’s opinion about Jayarajan’s arrest. “Does the CPI think that Jayarajan committed the crime (murder of Shukoor)?. The CPI should make it clear why it kept off the delegation,” he said in Idukki while addressing a party function.
The team that visited P. Jayarajan was led by CPM leader M.V. Jayarajan and Kerala Congress leader V. Surendran Pillai and it spent about 30 minutes with him in the jail.
However, CPI district secretary C. Raveendran said that his party was not aware of any such visit. “We have no problem in visiting P. Jayarajan in the coming days. There is no politics in this,” Raveendran said.
Meanwhile, CPI state secretary Panniyan Ravindran hit back at Pinarayi, saying the latter was making statements without understanding the truth. He was reacting to Pinarayi’s allegation on Sunday that CPI had killed several CPM comrades after the party split in 1964. “CPI has not killed anyone. If we take a count of how many CPI men have been killed since 1964, we can easily find out the truth,” Ravindran told the media in Kochi, subtly hinting that CPM men were the ones who killed CPI activists, and not the other way round.
“Mr Vijayan is increasingly making statements against CPI on the basis of heresay. At least he should have consulted those in his own party who knew facts better. Or he should have checked with the media,” the CPI leader said.
About CPI having kept off the last hartal, he said that his party could not stand by the decision of the CPM Kannur district unit. “We were not consulted at all. And, above all, the district unit of a party has no right to declare a state-wide hartal.”
But Pinarayi said in Idukki that CPI was not informed of the state-wide hartal decision as it declined to support an earlier move to hold a district-level hartal in Kannur to protest Jayarajan’s arrest.