Thiruvananthapuram, October 10 : Former chief minister and senior congress leader Oommen Chandy has come out strongly against attempts by leaders of the bharatiya janata party (BJP) to portray Kerala in a bad light.
In a sharply-worded facebook post on Friday, Chandy asserted that the people of Kerala would resist unitedly moves by BJP national president Amit Shah to malign the state.
“The attempt to insult Kerala using the failed ‘Gujarat model’ is preposterous,” he wrote, pointing out that the human development indices of Kerala for years have been of ‘international standards’.
The public backlash that prime minister Narendra had faced for comparing Kerala with Somalia was proof that the BJP’s anti-Kerala propaganda would come a cropper, Chandy added.
Slamming the BJP’s ‘janaraksha yatra’, the former chief minister charged that the ‘yatra’ could only be viewed as a cheap political tactic aimed at concealing the failures of the Narendra Modi-led government, of which corruption, price rise, infant deaths, and rail accidents have become the hallmarks.
What all states in the country, including Gujarat, desired was to be rescued from the BJP of Narendra Modi, who through his maladministration had wreaked havoc in all sectors of the country, Chandy quipped.
BJP launched the ‘janaraksha yatra’ in Kerala led by its state unit president Kummanam Rajasekharan on October 4. The stated aim of the ‘yatra’ is to highlight the alleged ‘red’ and ‘jihadi’ terror in the state.
A host of top BJP leaders, including national president Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, landed in Kerala to participate in the ‘yatra’.
