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Thiruvananthapuram, Sep 26 (IANS) While seasoned Kerala BJP leaders have been left high and dry in the newly constituted Team Nadda, one name which has raised eyebrows is former CPI-M Lok Sabha member and Congress legislator A.P. Abdulla Kutty, who has been given the post of national vice-president.
Fifty three-year-old Abdulla Kutty began his political career with the CPI-M's student wing.
Kutty achieved prominence by defeating present Kerala Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran twice - in 1999 and 2004 - from the Kannur Lok Sabha constituency.
In 2009, the CPI-M sacked him from the party amid mounting differences and also because he praised Modi's Gujarat development model.
He won the Kannur Assembly by-election in 2009 as a Congress candidate and repeated his victory in 2011, but in 2016, lost the polls from the Thalassery seat and after that he went into limbo in Congress politics. In 2019 he joined the BJP.
Soon he was made the vice-president of the Kerala unit and on Saturday got elevated as a national vice-president.
Tom Vadakkan, a former Congress spokesperson who hails from Kerala but is based in Delhi and businessman turned Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, are the other two Malayalees who find a place in Team Nadda.
This has come as a setback for Kerala based senior leaders including former Mizoram Governor and former Kerala BJP president Kummanam Rajasekharan and P.K. Krishna Das.
Sobha Surendran is another leader to have missed out.
The lone representative from Kerala in the Narendra Modi cabinet is V. Muraleedharan, who was elected to the Upper House from Maharashtra and is the Union Minister of State for External Affairs.
Another leader who hails from Kerala is former Union Minister K.J. Alphons, who is also a Rajya Sabha member but from Rajasthan.
In Kerala the BJP is caught between the factions of Muraleedharan and Krishna Das and at times their differences come out in the open, which has been a cause of displeasure of the national leadership of the BJP.
--IANS
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