New Delhi, May 22 : A delegation of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders led by union minister Nitin Gadkari on Sunday met President Pranab Mukherjee here and gave him a memorandum over violence against party workers in Kerala.
The delegation lodged a formal protest with the President over the violence which took place in Kerala on May 19-20 while the Left Democratic Front (LDF), led by the CPI-M, was celebrating its victory in the assembly elections.
During a victory procession at Edavilangu Kunneni in Thrissur district, some CPI-M workers allegedly attacked BJP worker V.R. Pramod, 38, seriously injuring him. He later died.
“While this incident in particular is one of the few cases of post-election violence unleashed by the LDF in Kerala, there has been a history of over 100 activists and workers of BJP and RSS having been brutally killed or injured for pursuing their nationalist ideological commitment,” the memorandum read.
“Now with the Left Front assuming power, there are visible signs of large-scale violence being escalated against the BJP workers,” it said.
The delegation expressed fear that Kerala may witness a “large scale organised crusade by the Left Front government” against the BJP workers and implored the President to initiate action to restrain any further attacks on the party workers.
Besides Gadkari, the BJP delegation included union ministers J.P. Nadda, Nirmala Sitharaman and Rajiv Pratap Rudy, party MPs Meenakshi Lekhi, Arjun Meghwal and M.J. Akbar and Kerala unit president Kummanam Rajasekharan.