Ahmedabad/New Delhi, May 27 (ANI): Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Congress Party spokesman Rashid Alvi on Sunday criticized the leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Central Government for not condemning and acting punitively against party leader M.M. Mani's boast of murdering their political opponents.
Addressing a function of BJP supporters in Ahmedabad, Modi described Mani's boast as shameful and questioned whether human rights organizations across the country, and in other parts of the world, were sleeping and not taking up this issue with more vigour.
Alvi described the boast as tragic and unfortunate, and demanded that the CPI-M leadership apply strictures on Mani, an influential Kerala CPM leader.
Mani had in a statement "revealed" that the party had "killed" political opponents in the past, pushing the Marxists on the back foot at a time they are trying to disown the murder of a former rebel.
The Kerala CPI-M outfit, which is led by PinarayiVijayan, said that Mani had deviated from the party line, and therefore, his statement is disowned.
Ironically, Mani, the CPI-M's Idukki district secretary, made his explosive remarks while trying to defend the party against allegations of plotting the killing of T.P. Chandrasekharan, who had left the CPI-M in 2008 and floated the Revolutionary Marxist Party.
Speaking at a CPI-M event yesterday, Mani was trying to de-link the party from the May 4 murder in Kozhikode that has led to the arrest of about half a dozen of its leaders and activists.
"If the party had had any role in the murder, it would not have been afraid to admit it," Mani bragged.
As proof, he reeled off details about three earlier murders of political opponents.
Mani said the CPI-M had in the past drawn up a list of opponents in his district and, consequently, three Congress activists were killed.
The first, Ancheri Baby - a worker of Congress labour arm INTUC - was bumped off in the 1980s; another was hacked to death and the third beaten to death, he said.
For good measure, Mani warned that the party would not shy away from neutralising its foes in the future, too, if necessary.
His comments have come as a blow to CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan's efforts to distance the party from the Chandrasekharan murder on the ground that physical annihilation of detractors was not part of party policy.
Congress chief minister Oommen Chandy described Mani's comments as "serious" and said that suitable legal action would be taken.
Rubbing it in, he asked Vijayan to react to Mani's claims.
State police chief Jacob Punnoose has asked the district superintendent of police for a report on the contents of Mani's speech.
Leaders of the ruling United Democratic Front have demanded that a case be registered against Mani.
The mother of Ancheri Baby asked a private TV channel that the 1980s killing should be reinvestigated. All the seven people arrested in the case were acquitted for want of evidence.
As for Chandrasekharan's murder, sources claim the investigators have obtained evidence that the plot was hatched at the higher levels of the party. (ANI)
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