THRISSUR: CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury has practically put to bed rumours that there will be a change of guard in the state if LDF wins the assembly elections. In an interview with TOI on Friday, he gave adequate hints that Pinarayi Vijayan will continue as the chief minister.
“The incumbent chief minister is leading the campaign. He has been treated as the captain by the people. The captain will remain the captain in the future, no? But formally, that will be decided after the elections,’’ he said.
“Our first task is to win the elections. Once that is won, automatically the other issues will be taken care of,’’ Yechury added.
Asked about the decision to drop some of the senior leaders in this election, even when the front’s major plank was continuity of government, he said: ``That has been the case always in the CPM, there will be continuity with a change. We stick to the principle that only two consecutive terms should be allowed for candidates. The whole country was saying that I have been denied the third term as the Rajya Sabha member earlier, when I myself had said my two terms are over, and I’m the party general secretary, and the decision to which I’m party to, should not be broken in my case also. We apply this yardstick everywhere, that will not be a problem for the return of the LDF to power in Kerala.”
On the opinion polls predicting landslide victory for the LDF in Kerala, and not very impressive results for the CPM-led front in West Bengal, he said opinion polls are opinion polls after all. “But the opinion polls have predicted a massive win for the LDF in Kerala, because that is the general mood of the people in Kerala now. In West Bengal, the opinion polls now say it will be a three-cornered fight. Earlier, it was a binary fight between BJP and Trinamool Congress. Slowly, it is happening, it is an eight-stage election, which will go on till the end of April. So much water still has to flow through the Ganga, there will be a lot of things that will change, in the coming days.”
He said the Election Commission has given a strange reason for the deferment of Rajya Sabha elections in Kerala, some reference from the Centre. If it is such a major reference, let the commission make it public, but it has not done so. That raises the suspicion that the decision has been taken under pressure. Once the election process is set in motion, not even the judiciary interferes, he said.
On the alliance between Congress and CPM in West Bengal and the bitter fight between the two parties in Kerala, he said, “In India that has always been the case everywhere, the specificities in each state determine the nature of political combine there. In 2004, out of the 61 members elected to the Lok Sabha, 57 had gone to the Lok Sabha by defeating the Congress. But then, we supported the Manmohan Singh government, for 10 years. The principle objective is to ensure that BJP is not able to come to power in any of the states which are going to polls now.’’
According to him the outcome of the polls in the five states will shatter the so-called “electoral invisibility of the BJP.” These outcomes will be a weapon in the hands of the opposition, the people, particularly the struggling sections like the farmers, the working class, and the youths demanding employment, to put pressure on the government to respond, he said.