By IANS
New Delhi/Thiruvananthapuram : Ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) nominee Pratibha Patil arrived in Kerala Thursday as part of her cross-country campaign to become India's first woman president even while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continued to insist that she was unfit to occupy the nation's highest post.
Patil was in Puducherry and then went on to Kerala where she met legislators who constitute the electoral college for the July 19 presidential election. She is expected to meet Karnataka legislators Friday.
While the BJP reiterated that the allegations against Patil were "disturbing and stark," the ruling Congress and the Left parties severely criticised the opposition's "mudslinging" against their candidate.
The opposition has targeted her with a high-pitch campaign for alleged financial improprieties related to a bank loan that she took in the seventies. She has also been accused of shielding her brother in a murder case.
The Congress has said it would not lower the dignity of the office of the president by joining issue with the opposition but has been vehemently critical of the BJP's "mudslinging" against its presidential candidate.
"The BJP is seeking to convert the presidential campaign into a public trial and is thus making baseless allegations on daily basis and believing and making others believe that there will be daily response from us," Congress spokesman Devendra Dwivedi told reporters in the capital.
While refraining from replying to the charges against her, Patil had on Wednesday appealed to her detractors not to lower the dignity of the president's office directly or indirectly.
"It was a short but highly dignified statement," claimed Dwivedi and reminded that Patil had earlier, while addressing legislators in Chennai, rejected the allegations as "being false and unfounded."
The Congress leader asked the BJP to restrain the "lowly tactics and irresponsible utterances."
The ruling party received a morale boost when the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), which also backs Patil but has so far maintained silence against the attack on the UPA candidate, came out strongly against the BJP's campaign.
"The scurrilous campaign unleashed by the BJP against the UPA candidate is stooping to such low levels, which we thought even the BJP was not capable of," the CPI-M has said in the latest issue of its mouthpiece People's Democracy.
But the BJP appears to be unfazed by the criticism.
In a statement party spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad alleged that Patil's "conspicuous silence" on the allegations only "reinforces the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding her."
"The people of the country need to ask this question: Is she, with such a past and a haunting present, at all fit to occupy the highest constitutional office of over one billion people?" Prasad asked.