District secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) P. Raju landed himself in a spot of bother on Saturday when he used strong words against Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, even making an oblique reference to his advisers as ‘dim-witted’.
Mr. Raju was, however, forced to chew his words by evening when the State leadership sought an immediate explanation from him for the remarks. In a statement issued here in the evening, he denied making defamatory statements against Mr. Vijayan’s advisers.
It was while inaugurating a protest of the Kerala State Transport Employees Union, affiliated to the CPI, at the KSRTC bus stand here that Mr. Raju chose to direct his anger at Mr. Vijayan for not intervening to better the lot of the employees of the beleaguered Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, which the other day witnessed transfer of workers en masse ostensibly for taking part in a strike.
He accused the corporation management and the Minister of behaving in a totalitarian fashion and said the Chief Minister could have intervened.
“It is okay that he [Mr. Vijayan] gets scared and catches a fever now and then,” he remarked and said the government needn’t have been at the beck and call of the Governor, in reference to the Governor recently ‘summoning’ the Chief Minister over the killing of an RSS worker in Thiruvananthapuram.