Congress Leader Mani Shankar Aiyar Condemns Party's Alliance with TVK in Tamil Nadu

NEW DELHI: Terming his party's decision to ally with the TVK in Tamil Nadu as "dreadful", veteran Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar on Friday said it smacked of "low political opportunism" and asserted that if the move facilitates the backdoor entry of a "communal BJP" into the Dravidian state then it would prove to be the worst own goal in the history of political football. Aiyar said he cannot imagine the fathers of the Indian National Congress blessing such a "politics of expediency". Speaking with PTI , Aiyar said the Congress' decision to jump ship immediately after an election fought with the DMK to plunge into a relationship with the very TVK that took "us on in the 23 assembly segments we lost and the five we won only days ago", was "dreadful". "This is an unforgivable violation of Mahatma Gandhi's 1925 maxim, 'Swaraj should be a government based on morality'," Aiyar told PTI. In an article published in the Hindu Tamil , the veteran Congress leader asked whether Chankya has prevailed or Mahatma Gandhi in the Congress switching partners in Tamil Nadu. "The Congress won five seats, not because of itself but entirely on the strength of its decades-old junior partnership with the DMK. Indeed, my former parliamentary constituency of Mayiladuturai proved to be such a stronghold of the DMK-led alliance, that five out of its six assembly segments voted against Vijay's TVK in favour of a galaxy of the members of the alliance with two seats going to the DMK and one each to alliance partners DMDK, IUML and the Congress," Aiyar said in his Tamil piece. Thus, the mandate ran clearly in favour of the DMK-led alliance and against the newcomer, he pointed out. "It is in the context of my association with this maverick parliamentary constituency over the past 35 years that I write this piece with immense regret and sorrow," Aiyar said.