CPI(M) Polit Bureau member B.V. Raghavulu has asserted that the defeat of the BJP in the 2019 elections is inevitable, irrespective of whether the Lok Sabha polls are advanced or not.
He told the media here on Sunday that the BJP would not be able to hold on to a majority of the seats that it had won in 2014 going by the political situation in different States. “Fearing rout, the BJP is toying with the idea of advancing the Lok Sabha elections and jumbling them with the next round of Assembly elections in some States,” he said.
Communal card
After sharing power with the People’s Democratic Party, the BJP had snapped ties with it with a view to gaining electoral mileage across the country by playing the “communal card” over the Kashmir issue, and this would boomerang on it, the CPI(M) leader said.
The CPI(M) was ready to join hands with actor-turned-politicians Pawan Kalyan in AP, and Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth in TN if they commit themselves to defeat the BJP, he said.
“The Left parties are already working together with Mr. Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party in the State . We will take a final decision (on the tie-up) once he announces his party’s policies and programmes with a view to emerging as a formidable front in the State,” he said.
Kadapa steel plant
Finding fault with Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s announcement that the State government would set up the steel plant in Kadapa if the Centre was not ready to so, he wondered what then was the purpose of the fast undertaken by TDP leaders C.M. Ramesh and ‘B.tech’ Ravi.
The Chief Minister, by having a truck with the BJP, had bartered away the State’s interests in the last four years, Mr. Raghavulu said. The need of the hour was a united fight to ensure that the steel plant and other assurances made at the time of the State’s bifurcation were implemented in toto by the Centre, he added.
Asserting that the steel plant in Kadapa was very much viable, he said there was a need for setting up more number of steels plants to reach the level of production in China.
Tributes to Karl Marx
Later, addressing a seminar on the relevance of Marxism organised on the occasion of Karl Marx’s 200th birth anniversary, he said the protectionist policies pursued by the U.S. and other countries pointed to serious crisis gripping capitalism. He called for concerted efforts to intensify the class war to replace it with socialism.