Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has clarified that no date has been fixed for the commissioning of the Kochi Metro after a junior minister incurred the State BJP’s wrath for announcing a date that did not suit the Prime Minister’s convenience.

The event will not happen on May 30 as was declared earlier on Friday by Kadakampally Surendran, Minister for Cooperation and Tourism in the Vijayan government.

Speaking to newspersons in Kannur on Friday evening, the Chief Minister said the State government will wait for the Prime Minister to return from his tour of three nations and engage his office to find a convenient date.

Minister Surendran had said that the event will happen on May 30 itself and the government “would not endlessly wait for the Prime Minister’s convenience in the matter.”

This had invoked instant opprobrium from an incensed State unit of the BJP which took the CPI(M)-led government to task for ‘playing cheap politics’ to keep away the Prime Minister.

The official function is to be got up at Aluva, from where the 13-km-long first phase of the project begins, the Minister had said, adding that “Prime Minister Modi is expected to be present.”

He also added a caveat saying that if, for some reason Modi is not able to make it, Chief Minister Vijayan himself would do the honours. The event cannot be delayed indefinitely merely because it doesn’t suit the Prime Minister’s convenience, he said.

This was apparently the last straw for the BJP, which alleged that May 30 was fixed with the full knowledge that the Prime Minister will be out of the country from May 29 to June 3 on a three-nation tour.

The itinerary that will take him to Germany, Spain and Russia was fixed as early as one-and-a-half months ago. He is expected to travel to Kazakhstan to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Council summit on June 7 and 8.

Later, he is scheduled to travel to the US and Israel, though no specific dates have been fixed.

The Prime Minister’s programmes are in public domain in advance and the Kerala government feigning any knowledge is an exercise in self-deception.

It exposes the petty-minded politics of the State government coalition which wanted to avoid the Prime Minister as an after-thought, the BJP said. This is utterly in poor taste and amounts to a disastrous public-relations exercise, the party added.

What the State government should have done was to wait for the Prime Minister’s convenience and fix a date in consultation with his office. Especially so when the Centre has made its own contribution in making the Metro project a reality, the BJP said.

Kummanam Rajasekharan, State BJP president, suspected a well-rooted conspiracy that was hatched at the government level to rush with the commissioning of the project.

Meanwhile, sources in the State government said a communication had been sent to the Prime Minister’s Office on April 11 seeking his convenience, but has not been acknowledged yet.

And the State Cabinet, in its wisdom, decided that the commissioning should take place on May 30 itself to commemorate the first year in office of the Pinarayi Vijayan government.