Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president J P Nadda on Tuesday came down heavily on Pinarayi Vijayan-led government in Kerala, accusing it of mishandling the Covid-19 pandemic situation, which, he said, led to the sorry state of affairs.
Inaugurating the new party office in Kozhikode in north Kerala through a video conference, Nadda said Kerala has turned into “a model of mismanagement” under the Vijayan regime.
“The government failed to tackle the pandemic. For more than a month, Kerala has been contributing half of the total cases in the country. This is nothing but gross mismanagement. It is reduced to a model of mismanagement,” he said, chiding the oft-repeated “Kerala model of development” by the left leaders.
The BJP president also criticised the low testing rate and vaccination programme being hijacked by local CPI (M) leaders. “In the state, more than half of tests are still antigen. The real mode is RT-PCR. It ignored repeated warnings of experts and failed to raise its test rate. The state also ignored some of the proactive steps taken by the Union government,” he said, adding that the Centre was willing to help the state always. He cited the special scheme worth ₹267 crores announced by Union health minister M Mandaviya upon his visit to the state on Monday.
“The government still finds refuge in some of its old records. It needs a sincere and pragmatic approach to come out of the present crisis. You can’t play politics everywhere,” he said, alleging that in some areas left workers hijacked the vaccination programme. He said like the left parties, the BJP never wanted to play politics during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the state reported another surge in Covid-19 cases, reporting 21,613 cases with a test positivity rate of 15. 48 per cent after 139,623 samples were tested. It also recorded 126 deaths, taking total fatalities to 18,870. The active caseload is 175, 167. The state recorded a high caseload when the country reported the lowest total, 25,166, since March. Among districts, Malappuram recorded 3,193 coronavirus cases followed by Ernakulam (2,643), Thrissur (2,470), Kozhikode (2,322), Palakkad (2,134), Kollam (1,692), Kannur (1,306), Alappuzha (1,177), Kottayam (1,155) and Thiruvananthapuram (1,155).
