Tuesday, Dec 23, 2003
Tuesday, Dec 23, 2003 |
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Kerala
By Our Special Correspondent
"Our initial assessment of the Karunakaran factions' ability to bring down the Antony Government proved wrong, but this was a collective failure on our part and it would be wrong to place the blame for it on any single party," the RSP general secretary, K. Pankajakshan, and the State secretary, T. J. Chandrachoodan, told a news conference here today. Briefing reporters about the deliberations of the two-day RSP Central committee meeting which concluded here on Sunday, they said the LDF had issued an ultimatum to the Karunakaran faction to work for a change of Government by November 30. This, they said, was what resulted in Mr. K. Karunakaran's visit to the Raj Bhavan and the subsequent events. "For a while, we all thought that the Government was coming apart, but it shortly became clear that they did not have the backing of enough MLAs to achieve a Government change," they said. The two RSP leaders said the LDF had never allowed the Karunakaran faction to use the LDF as a bargaining chip. All that the LDF had done was to support its moves to bring down the Antony regime so that there could be an end to relentless pursuit of anti-people policies by the Antony Government. The RSP, they said, saw no difference between the Antony and Karunakaran factions and its support to any alternative arrangement would have been conditional upon those seeking to form an alternative dispensation breaking free from the policy moorings of the Antony regime. They, however, pointed out that on several issues that formed the basis for LDF's agitations against the UDF Government such as the Muthanga incidents and indiscriminate sanctioning of self-financing professional colleges, the Karunakaran faction had taken a position that tallied with that of the Opposition. They might have had their own reasons for doing so, but what mattered at that point of time was that they had done so, the RSP leaders said. Mr. Pankajakshan and Prof. Chandrachoodan said the need of the hour was for Left unity, which could function as a nucleus for a broad Left and secular alternative to both the BJP and the Congress. The recent elections to four North Indian Assemblies had shown that the Congress' soft Hindutva was not the answer to the BJP's extreme Hindutva, they said. They expressed happiness about the CPI(M) politburo's assessment which also pointed to the need for a Third Alternative to the BJP and the Congress. The Central committee meeting, they said, had authorised the party national secretariat to hold discussions with the major Left parties on forging Left unity at the national level. The RSP national secretariat member and former West Bengal Minister, Devabrata Bandopadhyaya, who was also present at the news conference, said the RSP Central committee had decided to launch an agitation by plantation workers that would culminate in a Parliament March in the last week of February.
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