Do not make me talk about ‘children’, veteran Congress leader of Kerala AK Antony said on Tuesday, April 9, in an apparent reference to the defection of sons and daughters of prominent leaders in the party to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Taking questions on his son Anil Antony who had a year ago defected from the Congress to the BJP, Antony Senior said that he did not want to use a language about ‘children’ that was not a part of his culture and asked reporters not to force him to. He also said that Anil, who is contesting the Pathanamthitta constituency for the Lok Sabha elections, should be defeated by Congress candidate Anto Antony.
“He (Anil Antony) should lose, the Congress should win. There is no doubt that Anto will win with a big margin. Congress is my religion. Since the time I was a student leader, I have kept politics and personal life apart,” AK Antony said, adding that the ‘good times’ of the BJP are over.
Responding to the comments, Anil Antony said that his father had taught him a lot and was the person he was most close to, but added that whatever AK Antony has said since 2014 has been rejected by the people of India. “After 2014 [the year that the present BJP government led by Narendra Modi first came to power], has the Congress won any election? In the 2019 elections, they had lost so badly that they did not even qualify to have an Opposition Leader. Even in the state elections of 2016 and 2021, they lost pathetically. Nothing that these people said has come true in the last 10 years, so what is the use of them saying it over and over again,” Anil said.
Anil was the Congress’s IT cell coordinator before leaving the party in January last year after his criticism of a BBC documentary that highlighted the role of Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots. His views, supportive of the Prime Minister and against the documentary, contradicted the Congress’s stand. By April, he joined the BJP and in a few months was appointed the party’s national secretary. Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections this year, the BJP announced him as the party’s candidate in the Pathanamthitta constituency of Kerala to take on the Communist leader Thomas Isaac and the sitting Congress parliamentarian Anto Antony.
“It was the Sabarimala issue (resulting from a court verdict that allowed the entry of women of menstruating age to the temple, which was opposed by the right wing Hindutva outfits) that helped the BJP get a lot of votes in 2019. They won’t get anywhere close this time in Kerala. As long as India is there, there will also be the Indian National Congress,” Antony Senior said.