By IANS
New Delhi : Stepping up his overtures to the Congress, former Kerala chief minister K. Karunakaran Thursday heaped praise on the party and its president Sonia Gandhi. But son K. Murlidharan sounded a jarring note.
Karunakaran, who left the Congress two years ago to form the Democratic Indira Congress-Karunakaran (DIC-K) and later joined the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), argued that the Congress was the only party with a national spread although it has weakened “a bit” in some places.
“I will do everything possible to strengthen the Congress from inside and outside,” Karunakaran told reporters here.
“I have never left the Congress. I just distanced from its policies for a while. Can anybody say that I am not a Congressman?” Karunakaran, popularly known as ‘leader’, asked in his characteristic style.
However Murlidharan, the NCP Kerala unit president, denied that his father wanted to go back to the parent party. “There is no truth in the reports. It is a wrong interpretation.”
Karunakaran, who is here to attend the NCP working committee meeting, also said he had contacted many senior Congress leaders in the capital.
Not hiding his desire to return to the Congress fold, he said: “I want all old Congressmen to come back to the party. The Congress should make efforts for it.”
Karunakaran, who had severely criticised Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her leadership before he quit the party, was now all praise for her.
“Sonia Gandhi has done a good job (while) in power. She has provided good leadership to the (ruling) coalition,” he said.
Reminded about his harsh words about Gandhi, he explained: “I felt bad at the way she treated me at that time. But I do not hold anything against her now.”
However, Karunakaran’s change of mind was not visible in Murlidharan’s words to reporters.
“Whoever is saying that NCP leaders want to go back to Congress are trying to create confusion in the NCP,” he said.
According to Murlidharan, he had asked NCP chief Sharad Pawar to field candidates in all the 20 constituencies in Kerala for the next parliamentary elections.
“We do not want even an electoral understanding with the Congress let alone a merger,” he said.
Murlidharan argued that Karunakaran’s “good words” for Gandhi were natural because the Congress chief was also the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), of which the NCP is a constituent.