By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram


The Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), the junior partner of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which leads Kerala’s opposition Left Democratic Front (LDF), yesterday ended its 33-year camaraderie with the coalition.
The RSP, also part of the Left Front at the national level, will now join the Congress-led ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) and field former minister N K
Premachandran from Kollam in the April 10 Lok Sabha election.
The party leaders are expected to hold talks with the Congress Party today on its entry into the UDF. With this, the strength of the UDF headed by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy will go up from 73 to 75 in the 140-member asssembly.
The LDF will also lose the majority in the Kollam corporation.
“The CPM was systematically decimating us. They took away Kollam, which had elected Premachandran twice, and five of the nine assembly seats we used to contest. So we decided not to take it lying down anymore,” said A A Azeez, the party’s state unit secretary.
The announcement came after he spoke to the chief minister, state president of the Congress V M Sudheeran Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala.
The entry into the UDF is expected to be a smooth affair as a breakaway faction of the RSP, headed by Shibu Baby John, the labour minister in the Chandy cabinet who defeated Premachandran in the 2011 assembly elections, is already a part of the ruling alliance.
Immediately after the announcement, John drove to the RSP headquarters here and held preliminary discussions with RSP leaders, including its national general secretary T J Chandrachoodan on a possible merger.
Rejecting CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan’s plea not to react “emotionally”, Azeez said the decision was well thought out and there was no going back even if the Kollam seat was offered.
The CPM had last week decided to field its politburo member M A Baby, the former education minister who is also a serving legislator, in Kollam. It finalised candidates for all but one of the 16 seats it wanted to contest leaving four to the second largest constituent Communist Party of India (CPI).
Another partner, Janata Dal (Secular) with four members in the assembly, also protested against the way the two Communist parties shared seats among them without taking the junior partners into confidence and threatened to go the RSP way.
The partners are angry at the CPM decision to field two Congress Party leaders
(Peelipose Thomas in Pathanamthitta and V Abdurrahman in Ponnani), a film star
(Innocent in Chalakkudy) and a retired bureaucrat (Christy Fernandez in  Ernakulam) without accommodating them.
Azeez said his party would remain with the Left Front in West Bengal, where it is contesting in four seats, and at the national level like the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which is an LDF partner here while remaining an ally of the Congress Party elsewhere.
“We are ready for talks with the RSP without any prejudice,” said Sudheeran. “We now have to discuss the developments with our partners as well as within the party to avoid any problem in future.”