Mud flies in Kerala, BJP calls in housekeepers

With the Lok Sabha polls increasing the state vote share to an unprecedented 12.5 per cent and the local and Assembly polls coming up fast, the BJP national leadership has been doing delicate damage control the past week.

For the RSS, it has asked former Union minister O. Rajagopal, whom the Sangh accused of meddling too much in organisational affairs, to move out of the party headquarters. It has also eased Sangh veteran K. Raman Pillai from his job of general secretary. The two were mainstays of the beleaguered state president, P.S. Sreedharan Pillai. Both, however, have claimed the leadership had only agreed to their own requests to do what it did.

The other side gloats that RSS strong man and former state general secretary P.P. Mukundan , Sreedharan Pillai’s bete noire, has been ‘‘suitably reprimanded’’, though Mukundan denies it.

RSS sources say reports quoting Venkaiah Naidu that Mukundan has now been moved to Tamil Nadu, is wrong — Mukundan has been in charge of that state for the last seven months anyway.

‘‘It’s sad that veterans like Rajagopal and Raman Pillai had to be put to this. But we need to clean up now and not later,’’ says a top state leader originally from the RSS. ‘‘The party structure needs to be preserved. We can’t let things ride beyond a point,’’ asserts another in the official leadership. The RSS-BJP feud here is nothing new. It has been on at least since Mukundan’s lateral entry as state general secretary at the insistence of the Sangh, and the infamous Congress-Muslim League-BJP truck experiment coupled with large-scale selling of votes in the 1991 polls, which a high level party probe reported to New Delhi. The probe team had squarely accused Mukundan and his men of wholesale trading of the Parivar votes, but nothing came of it. The RSS side had gone to town with allegations about Raman Pillai’s kin bagging a petrol pump during the NDA Petrol Pump scam. Another allegation being raked up is about Sreedharan Pillai himself being named in a petition filed by a woman who claimed she had paid Rs 10 lakh to the BJP honchos to get a petrol pump — Mukundan figured in it too.

Pillai, a suave lawyer, had chosen to keep his job as standing counsel for the Centre even after he became state chief. His detractors say he did that to mint money, often side-tracking the assistant counsel he was provided, and refusing to part with ‘‘lucrative files’’.

‘‘Pillai is a part-time president. The party needs a full time one to can carry the whole parivar with him,’’ says a senior RSS leader.

RSS man and Yuva Morcha state leader K.S. Surendran went complaining to the BJP national leadership that Sreedharan Pillai had tried to sabotage a youth meet, and got himself reprimanded for it. Pillai suspended two state committee members to check an RSS-BJP power struggle.

The charge is that Pillai prevented P.C. Thomas, lone NDA MP from Kerala, from fielding his party nominees for the Assembly bypolls in Koothuparamba and Azhikode, after BJP decided against putting up its own men.