Thiruvananthapuram/New Delhi — K. Muraleedharan, son of veteran Kerala politician K. Karunakaran, was Tuesday appointed state president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
The new appointment, announced in New Delhi by NCP leader and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, comes after the merger of the Democratic Indira Congress-Karunakaran (DIC-K) with the NCP earlier this month. Karunakaran formed the DIC-K in May last year after he left the Congress.
The new appointment makes it the third time that Muraleedharan has been president of a different political party in a span of less than three years.
In January 2004, he was made the powerful president of the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, which then ruled the state under A.K. Antony, now the country’s defence minister.
After DIC-K was formed in May last year, Muraleedharan became its president.
Now he is president of the Kerala unit of the NCP.
Now all eyes are on the future course of action that the NCP will take because the Communist Party of India and Revolutionary Socialist Party – both allies of the ruling Left Democratic Front in Kerala – as well as Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan have said that the new NCP, after its merger with DIC-K, will not be admitted into the LDF, of which it is an ally.