Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Karunanidhi reprimands Minister

CHENNAI: Chief Minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president M. Karunanidhi on Thursday reprimanded Electricity Minister and party treasurer Arcot N.Veeraswami for his comments on the Left parties on Wednesday.

He cautioned partymen against indulging in such criticism against alliance partners and said that the DMK high level committee would discuss the decision of the Left parties on the alliance and then formulate a strategy. Till then, he asked his partymen not to raise the issue.

Criticising the Left parties, Mr. Veeraswami had said that they joined hands with the BJP in a bid to block the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. He also asked if the Left parties wanted the country to remain in darkness.

In a statement here, Mr. Karunanidhi said that the Left parties had already announced that they would take a decision on their relations with the DMK at the meeting of their State councils. Mr. Veeraswami’s comments came at this juncture. “It is not only a bit excessive but also contradictory to our approach,” he said.

Asserting that in the recent past both the Left parties were speaking without the spirit of the alliance in mind, Mr. Karunanidhi said that they would ponder over before they acted and that they would take into consideration their own practices in Nandigram when they approach the issue of Rettanai [where the police forcibly dispersed people protesting against lower than stipulated wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme].

On the criticism that the DMK allied with the BJP even after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, he said he was willing to provide a list of political parties that had a different tack in each State and in each era. When the DMK entered into an alliance with the BJP it was on the basis of a common minimum programme (CMP). Both the parties had signed this document. There was no place for communal politics in the CMP. When the BJP began deviating from the CMP, the DMK pulled out its Ministers and quit the alliance, he said.

The Congress and its allies have suffered serious setbacks in several States including Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh in the last four years owing to faulty economic policies of the United Progressive Alliance Government at the Centre, Communist Party of India (Marxist) State secretary N. Varadarajan, said on Thursday.

Reacting to Mr. Veeraswami’s observation that in the Lok Sabha elections, parties such as the CPI(M) would disappear from the scene without any trace, Mr. Varadharajan, in a statement, said it was the DMK that was part of the UPA regime and if the party continued its alliance with the Congress, it would also meet the same fate.

The CPI(M) had already made it clear that it would not have any truck with those parties that had ties with the Congress and the BJP and it was for the DMK to spell out its position.

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