NCP faction to formalise merger with Kerala’s All India Forward Bloc

A faction of India’s Nationalist Congress Party led by former Kerala State president N.A. Muhammed Kutty will formalise its merger with the All India Forward Bloc at a meeting in Kochi on Sunday. The meeting will be held at Ernakulam Town Hall and is expected to be attended by All India Forward Bloc national general secretary G.

Devarajan and Muhammed Kutty. Muhammed Kutty said the faction would remain committed to supporting the Forward Bloc’s alignment with the INDIA bloc. He also said it would continue the party’s opposition to the Chief Election Commissioner and what he described as discrepancies in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.

According to Muhammed Kutty, a majority of the faction’s committees supported the merger, while a few chose to align with the National Democratic Alliance. He linked the decision to a change in the NCP’s national political direction. He said the NCP national leadership had moved towards an alliance with the NDA across India after Sunetra Pawar took charge of the party following the death of her husband, Ajit Pawar.

Muhammed Kutty said this represented a departure from the earlier position of maintaining an alliance with the NDA only in Maharashtra. The Kerala unit had remained part of the Left Democratic Front, but later faced disagreements with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) over seat allocation before the last Assembly election. Explaining the faction’s decision, he said the Kerala State unit was largely made up of people who had joined from Congress[S] or the Democratic Indira Congress associated with K.

Karunakaran. He said aligning with either the United Democratic Front or the Left Democratic Front was therefore the logical course, and that the faction had chosen the Forward Bloc because of its socialist credentials. The source material did not provide details about the size of the faction or the formal legal consequences of the merger.