The rumblings of discord among top Congress leaders in the State appeared to get louder on Saturday.
Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president Mullappally Ramachandran has put off a meeting of the Public Affairs Committee (PAC) scheduled for March 8 after he felt that a set of leaders had used the previous meeting of the decision-making body to disparage his leadership. Mr. Ramachandran purportedly felt the leaders had undermined the agenda of the meeting by feeding ‘cherry-picked’ information about the ‘bitter dissension’ the KPCC president ‘faced’ in the PAC to the media shortly before his customary press conference.
The calculated ‘leaks’ generated television news headlines that cast the party in a bad light and diverted attention from the issues the KPCC had hoped to highlight against the Left Democratic Front government.
Mr. Ramachandran has approached the party high command for advice. By some accounts, Mr. Ramachandran felt that the newly reconstituted KPCC with 12 vice presidents and 34 general secretaries had rendered the PAC redundant.
Incommunicado
A party insider said at least three leaders in the 26-member PAC had accused Mr. Ramachandran of remaining incommunicado for extended periods without answering or returning telephone calls. They accused him, and Leader of the Opposition Ramesh Chennithala of a mutual lack of communication that had resulted in the leaders taking different positions on the same issue at least on two occasions recently. Some felt the ‘aloofness’ between leaders had sown confusion among the rank and file on whether the Congress should align itself with the LDF in its fight against the Centre on the CAA.
More recently, Mr. Ramachandran and Mr. Chennithala had expressed divergent views on the demand for an inquiry by the CBI into the corruption in the Police Department. Some felt the criticism against Mr. Ramachandran in the PAC stemmed from his insistence that MPs and MLAs voluntarily stay away from party posts. The move had upended traditional post-sharing arrangements in the KPCC, earning barbed comments against him in the PAC.
