More Kerala leaders rap Tharoor for hailing Modi

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 26 (IANS) Congress Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor continues to face attacks from party colleagues for supporting the stance of two other party leaders -- Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh -- that demonising Prime Minister Narendra Modi all the time would not work.

While on Sunday, Kerala party unit chief Mullapally Ramachandran and Leader of Opposition in Kerala House Ramesh Chennithala criticised him, on Monday K. Muraleedharan, Benny Behanan and T.N. Prathapan took a potshot at the Thiruvananthapuram MP.

While Muraleedharan said anyone who wished to glorify Modi must join the BJP, Behanan said it was not a Congress MP's job to praise Modi. "The role of a Congress lawmaker is to oppose the BJP policies and not to glorify Modi," said Behanan, who is also the convenor of the Congress-led UDF in Kerala.

Prathapan, in a letter to interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, asked her to rein in leaders who were glorifying Modi.

Reacting to party colleagues' criticism, Tharoor had said on Sunday he stood by his remarks. "It didn't mean he support Modi," he said.

Tharoor, has not always been in the good books of many state party leaders, right from 2009, when as a rank outsider he was fielded by the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections and won by 99,996 votes and has been keeping the seat since then.

In 2014, Tharoor won the seat by 15,000 votes and in 2019 by 99,989 votes. He had termed the 2014 vote his toughest election as his wife Sunanda Pushkar had been found dead in a posh Delhi hotel in the January of that year.