A day after former State Minister and CPI-M legislator M.M. Mani apologised for his remarks on the floor of the Kerala Assembly against K.K. Rema, she received a threat letter from a group called ‘Payyannur Comrades’.
Rema had won the Assembly election with the support of the Congress-led UDF. She is the widow of top former CPI-M leader T.P. Chandrasekheran, who was brutally slashed 51 times by a group of attackers near his house in Kozhikode in 2012.
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After receiving the threat letter, she filed a complaint with the State Police chief on Friday.
Rema, whose party Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) is an unofficial ally of the Congress-led UDF, won with a big victory from the Vadakkara Assembly constituency in the April 2021 Assembly polls and it came as a big shock for the ruling CPI-M.
Incidentally, in the 2016 Assembly polls, though Rema contested, she did not have the support of the Congress-led UDF and came a poor third.
The letter was received by Rema at her legislator hostel apartment, here and it stated: “they will not care if they lose power, they will take the decision”.
Chandrasekheran left the party in 2008 and formed his own party and since then became a thorn in the flesh of CPI-M.
A total of 11 people were sentenced to life imprisonment of which three were CPI-M leaders in the area. The then CPI-M state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan had called him a ‘renegade’.
On the floor of the Assembly every time Rema gets up to speak, there is a hush silence on what she will speak and on quite a few occasions in the past one year, she has taken on Vijayan. Early this week, after Rema went hammer and tongs against Vijayan, she was attacked by Mani who said that “it was her fate that she became a widow and the CPI-M or the Left had no role in it”.
Soon this became an issue and what came as the biggest surprise was when Vijayan defended Mani in the Assembly and so did CPI-M state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, outside the Assembly.
But following the protests and after Speaker M.B. Rajesh took up the issue, Mani expressed regret for his remarks.
