Monday, May 2 2005 17:42 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Thiruvananthapuram: Slamming the Karunakaran faction for naming the new party it floated after Indira Gandhi, CWC member A K Antony said that the Congress in Kerala should take the split as a blessing in disguise, as it gave an opportunity to strive unitedly to strengthen the party.

"The decision of a section to break out of the party should be taken as a curse-turned-boon. Here is an opportunity to rise above factional considerations and work unitedly to activate and strengthen the party at all levels," Antony told a press meet in Thiruvananthapuram.

Karunakaran and his supporters had done a great disservice to the memory of late Indira Gandhi because it was she who took the initiative to re-unite the Congress in Kerala after the 1978 split to save the State from the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPM) rule, he said.

The new party (National Congress-Indira) had made it unambiguously clear that it wanted to bring back Marxist rule in Kerala. This would amount to showing disrespect to the late leader, Antony said.

The Congressmen, who had joined the breakaway faction, are walking into a "deadly trap", as the Congress and Marxists, could not get along together in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, he said.

Antony said that he was saying this from his personal experience of the short-lived alliance with the CPM in 1980.The circumstances in Kerala were sharply different from those at the national level, he said.