A step away from son, Karunakaran is that much ‘closer’ to Congress

Still choosing to keep his last card close to his chest while Sonia Gandhi keeps mum on allowing him back...

Still choosing to keep his last card close to his chest while Sonia Gandhi keeps mum on allowing him back, wannabe ‘simple Congress worker’ K Karunakaran on Friday staged a ritual parting of political ways with his son to clear a final public hurdle.

The event, played out at his Thiruvananthapuram home, also meant an imminent vertical split in the state NCP wedged between the two coalition fronts in Kerala that his son and state president K Muralidharan has been trying to flog to some life. This was after the Left Democratic Front had booted it out of the coalition for taking in the father and son, more particularly the former.

Karunakaran sought formal endorsement and backing from his brood of camp followers, including several state-level NCP leaders and those heading the party’s feeder outfits, all of who he had led out of the Congress into the DIC (Karunakaran) and then on the NCP, and now hopefully back into Congress. Predictably, the 50-odd acolytes who turned up passed an impromptu resolution that said they would accept “any political decision” that their nonagenarian leader took, after he declared that at this stage he could no longer keep himself away from the Congress, with which he was for 70 years.

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Later, Karunakaran, still waiting for formal word from the Congress about his return, refused to commit himself to the media saying that he would announce his final plans only next week. he said he would be in touch with the Congress high command.

Muralidharan, whose only faint chance to pick up the NCP from between the two coalition stools in the state and take it back to the Left is speculated to be if only his father went out, claimed that what Karunakaran did today was “irrelevant” . He claimed the NCP leaders closeted with Karunakaran today had actually secured his permission to meet his father and they would be grilled on Saturday at the NCP state executive meeting to determine if they had been into any anti-party activity at Karunakaran’s home. The Karunakaran men, however, have announced that none of them would go to the meeting.

Muralidharan, who talked of strong action against party dissidents, however, said that would not apply to Karunakaran. “Even Sonia Gandhi never took action against Karunakaran. The NCP and Sharad Pawar too will not act against him for what he did today,” he said, firmly ruling out following his father back into the Congress.

Senior Karunakaran aide Kodoth Govindan Nair maintained that the father-son political rift was for real this time. “There can be no father-son relationship in politics. There are ideological differences between them, and Muralidharan has made it clear that he has a different political stand,” Nair said.