By IANS,
New Delhi : Launching a fresh attack on the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), a senior minister in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government Tuesday said the Left’s “help” has given the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “new hopes” to fulfill its dreams including the construction of a Ram temple in the disputed area at Ayodhya.
“The CPI-M’s aggressive anti-Congress stance and its past history during which it had joined hands with even the BJP to defeat the Congress force me believe that (its general secretary Prakash) Karat was going to help the BJP,” Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi told reporters at Parliament House.
“Hoping that the position of the CPI-M would help them, the BJP has revived its original agenda including the construction of a Ram temple,” Ravi alleged.
The minister’s charges came after reports that many senior CPI-M leaders raised questions about the party leadership’s decision to vote against the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government along with the BJP, a party it has always branded as “commumal”.
The Congress-led UPA government is facing a trust vote in the Lok Sabha July 22 after the CPI-M-led Left parties withdrew their four-year legislative support.
Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who was asked by the CPI-M leadership to quit his post before July 22, and West Bengal Sports Minister Subhas Chakraborty reportedly wrote to Karat saying it would not be correct to vote against the Congress-led government along with the BJP during the July 22 trust vote.
Chakraborty, who is also a CPI-M state secretariat member, said the Communists would have to answer embarrassing questions from people for a long time if its MPs voted against the Congress.
Countering the Left’s argument that the Congress had voted with the BJP to bring down the V.P. Singh government in 1990, Ravi said: “It was the CPI-M that joined hands with the BJP to support V.P. Singh’s government. We were in opposition and it was our duty to bring down the government.”
Ravi also said the Communists had joined hands with the BJP’s forerunner Jana Sangh to defeat former Congress prime minister Indira Gandhi, “who fought against the US imperialism aggressively and who had joined hands with the erstwhile Soviet Union to counter the imperialist forces”.
Launching the Left campaign against the government, Karat Monday said the Congress had no right to point fingers at the Left as it had voted with the BJP to bring down the V.P. Singh government in 1990 and later “conspired” to remove the governments of H.D. Deve Gowda in 1997 and I.K. Gujral in 1998.