Two former CPI-M MPs get ready to join Congress

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A senior Congress leader told IANS that the preliminary talks for induction of former CPI-M MPs K.S. Manoj and S. Sivaraman have begun.

"Now this has to be discussed at the party level and it is expected to take place when the committee meets next. Three more leaders of significance in the CPI-M are also expected to leave the party," the Congress leader, who did not want to be identified, said.

The first to leave the CPI-M was two time former Lok Sabha MP from Kannur, A.P. Abdullah Kutty, who was expelled from the party last year. He is currently a Congress legislator from the Kannur assembly constituency.

In early January, former Alappuzha MP K.S. Manoj had quit the CPI-M on ideological grounds.

Manoj, a anaesthetist by profession, is understood to have had parleys with the Alappuzha district Congress unit and they have given the green signal for his induction.

Last week, it was the turn of Sivaraman, a CPI-M student leader, who was fielded at Ottapalam - a traditional Congress bastion - in 1993 and surprised everyone when he won with a margin of over 1.3 lakh votes.

While in the CPI-M and as a parliamentarian, his closeness to the present state Congress president Ramesh Chennithala had made the Left party jittery.

Sivaraman's entry has also been cleared by the local Congress unit in Palakkad district.

However, criticising the three, senior CPI-M leader and former MP T.K. Hamza said that all of them were those who got everything when they were in the CPI-M.

"The only job that Manoj knows is to 'make people faint'. If not for the party, would anyone have known a person like Manoj. Sivaraman is upset because our party did not defend him after his wife who works in a cooperative bank was alleged to have embezzled money. I myself became what I am today because of the CPI-M," said Hamza, who left the Congress to join the CPI-M in 1984 and has served as four-time legislator and a state minister once here.