By IANS,
Kochi : Congress president Sonia Gandhi Tuesday urged party workers here to continue their good work and asked them to expose the failures of the Left government in Kerala.
“Never before has any government at the Centre given so much to Kerala. The Left government here is trying to take the credit for all the good things that the central government does. You must explain to the people and expose the failures of the Left government,” Gandhi said while addressing party members here.
Gandhi, also the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), arrived here Monday to take part in a three-day state conference of the Congress that began here Sunday.
She criticised the manner in which the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) was governing the state.
“The Left here has failed to make use of the various centrally sponsored schemes. The various pillars of the democracy in the state here have been attacked by the Left. Whenever they come to power here, they settle political scores by resorting to atrocities against our party. People here are fed up of the present government and you should all work to give a befitting reply to them at the time of the Lok Sabha elections,” Gandhi said.
At a public meeting here Monday, she had lashed out against the lack of unity among the ruling LDF partners.
State party president Ramesh Chennithala expressed the state party’s willingness to hold the next session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at Kochi.
“The last time such a session was held here was in 1969 and we wish that the next AICC meeting be held here and we are prepared for it,” said Chennithala.
He told Gandhi that the half table that she used during the meeting was the same that Jawaharlal Nehru used when he came here in the mid 1950s.
The Left parties withdrew their outside support to the UPA government in New Delhi earlier this year following their differences over the India-US nuclear deal.
The Kerala unit of the Congress has billed Gandhi’s visit as the launch of the campaign for the Lok Sabha polls, due by May 2009.