Karat stand amateurish,says CPI

Bose was recently expelled after he resigned from the CPM.

Days after CPM general secretary Prakash Karat said his party factored in the rift between the Congress and the Trinamool while deciding to back Pranab Mukherjee as it was necessary to utilise such fissures,his CPI counterpart S Sudhakar Reddy on Thursday said taking a party or state-centric position in the Presidential election was amateurish.

Karat also got a response from his former comrade Prasenjit Bose,who said the general secretarys defence of the decision was feeble and perfunctory. Bose was recently expelled after he resigned from the CPM.

Like Karat,Reddy too came out with an article defending his partys decision to abstain. He said CPI could not have backed a Congress candidate since it is fighting against its anti-people policies. Nor can it afford to back an NDA-backed nominee. The only course left was abstention.

Some quarters have raised the question that abstaining from voting is undemocratic. It is not true. As the provision for rejection is not there,abstaining is the only alternative though not much desirable, Reddy said. He argued that a party-centric or state-centric position in a national poll will be amateurish to say the least.