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Social media war hots up between Chandy and Achuthanandan

Trivandrum - Chandy has fallen prey to the nonagenarian leader by mocking him and his party for using the computer technology after opposing it for long.

The social media campaign for the assembly polls in Kerala has heated up after opposition leader V.S. Achuthanandan joined Facebook and Twitter a week ago.
The 92-year-old veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader, who is the leading campaigner for the Left Democratic Front (LDF), has stirred up netizens by lashing out at his political opponents with the same verve with which he attacks them on the field.
His main target on Facebook is Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who is leading the campaign for the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) along with Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala and Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee chief V.M. Sudheeran.
Chandy has fallen prey to the nonagenarian leader by mocking him and his party for using the computer technology after opposing it for long. Chandy said Kerala would have been the IT capital of the country in place of Karnataka if the Left parties had not opposed the computers in the eighties.
Achuthanandan hit back at Chandy saying he and his government had only tried to stall the initiatives made by the previous LDF governments in promoting IT industry by selling off the assets built by them at a pittance. He said the Infopark providing jobs to 28,000 persons would have been in the hands of SmartCity if he had not opposed it.
Achuthanandan said Chandy had converted the SmartCity project being showcased by him now as one of the major achievements of the UDF into a real estate venture. He said his last government had tried to prevent this from happening.
Chandy countered him by asking questions on FB about his shifting stand on various issues, including the SNC Lavalin case involving his colleague Pinarayi Vijayan and the brutal murder of his former follower T.P. Chandrashekharan by his party men for questioning the ideological deviations in the party.
After Achuthanandan clarified his position on these issues, Chandy kept quiet, but the former is not ready to leave him. In his latest FB post on Sunday, he came down on Chandy saying "he has no answers, only questions".
However, the chief minister has taken on Achuthanadan for the 'baseless' allegations he made against him and his ministerial colleague while addressing an election meeting in north Kerala on Friday.
In a statement released to the press, Chandy warned legal action against the opposition leader if he did not tender an apology on his allegation that he and his ministers were facing 136 corruption cases. Terming it a big lie, the chief minister asked the CPM leader to specify the cases.
"Achuthanandan has alleged there were 31 corruption cases against me in the Supreme Court. There is not even a single case against me. There are allegations but they cannot be treated as cases unless a first information report is registered." Chandy said.
Chandy said there were no such cases against any of his cabinet colleagues. There is only one case against former finance minister K.M. Mani but even that has been found false by the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Chandy said the opposition leader was making false allegations as he had nothing else to say against him and his government.
news@khaleejtimes.com