Congress forms panel to probe Kerala party leader praising Modi

Thiruvananthapuram, May 28 (IANS) The Kerala unit of the Congress will appoint a commission to probe senior party leader A.P. Abdullakutty praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the state party chief said on Tuesday.

State Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran told the media here that following a complaint that they received from the Kannur unit of the party about a Facebook post by Abdullakutty praising Modi, the party has decided to appoint a commission to probe it.

"I am of the view that action should be taken, because it has been made on Facebook and is there for all to see. But our party being a democratic one, we have decided to appoint a commission to look into it and once they finish it, we will look into it," said Ramachandran soon after senior party leaders met here.

What has irked the top brass of the Congress leadership here is that Abdullakutty points out that Modi is following the Gandhian model of governance and his huge success in the polls has not just surprised the opposition but also the BJP.

52-year-old Abdullakutty rose in the political arena through the student wing of the CPI-M and as their party candidate defeated Ramachandran twice in 1999 and 2004 from the Kannur Lok Sabha seat.

In 2009, the CPI-M booted him out of the party after their differences worsened. It began after he praised Modi's development model in Gujarat.

After leaving CPI-M, he joined the Congress party and won the Kannur Assembly by-election in 2009 and again repeated his success in the 2011 Assembly polls, but in 2016 he lost to young CPI-M leader A.M. Shamsheer from the Tellichery Assembly constituency and since then has been keeping a low profile in politics.

So this is the second time that Abdullakutty has run into trouble, for praising Modi.

But quick to respond, Abdullakutty said all he did was to point out the development programmes of Modi, similar to what Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had said earlier.