| Muraleedharan took oath yesterday as a minister in a government he had criticised in the bitterest terms. |
| Muraleedharan's appointment was part of a patch-up formula worked out by the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) to settle the prolonged factional fight in the state party unit led by his father and veteran Congress leader K Karunakaran. Speaker E Thangachan is expected to become the president of the state unit. |
| With Muraleedharan's inclusion in the Cabinet, the strength of the three-year-old United Democratic Front ministry has gone up to 21. |
| Governor Sikander Bakht administered the oath of office and secrecy to Muraleedharan at a function at Raj Bhavan in the state capital as the Congress top leadership tried to play down its action of bowing before the party's 79-year old enfant terrible, K Karunakaran, on the grounds that "Karunakaran was with Indira Gandhi when everyone else deserted her in 1977. We cannot just throw him out of the party." |
| Karunakaran and his daughter Padmaja Venugopal were among those present when Muraleedharan took oath. A large number of Congress workers from different parts of the state also turned up to witness the swearing in, a ceremony that turned into a demonstration of strength. |
| Muraleedharan's entry into the Cabinet marked an anti-climax in the factional drama in the state Congress as he agreed to obey the central party leadership's diktat the same day his father threatened to split the party a fortnight ago. |
| Muraleedharan, who often backed his father's demand for a leadership change in the state, had since then defended his decision to fall in line, holding that unity was crucial for the party when Lok Sabha polls were round the corner. |
| The rise of 46-year-old Muraleedharan in Kerala politics was meteoric after he became active in the Congress in the late 1980s as state Seva Dal chief. He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kozhikode thrice. |
| He was made KPCC chief as part of a compromise formula in the faction-riven state Congress unit in May 2001, the same day Antony took charge as the chief minister. |
| In the initial phases of his stewardship of the party, Muraleedharan appeared keen to rise above the interests of the faction led by his father but his relations with Antony were strained after the Ernakulam Lok Sabha by-election. |
| Muraleedharan's decision to dissociate himself from Karunakaran's plan to float a new party had come as a surprise to many as he had often been more vociferous than his embittered father in attacking Antony. |
| The question now is whether this concession will be enough to pacify Karunakaran till the Lok Sabha election or whether he will leverage his dissidence value to defeat the official Congress candidates as he had done in the Ernakulam by-election. |
| The Congress leadership accepted wryly that group politics was a fact of life in the Congress in Kerala. |
| "There are leaders there (in Kerala) who expel people from their group. Newspapers play up the fact that so and so has shifted from this group to that group. What can we do? Yes, Karunakaran's public airing of grievances has harmed the party in Kerala. But we cannot expel a person like him. That would be hurting the very edifice of the Congress in the state," a top party leader of Karunakaran's generation said. |
| Karunakaran's demands for nominations in the Lok Sabha is the next strain that the central party leadership is expecting on Antony. Karuankaran is likely to ask for eight Lok Sabha seats for his group, but may get just one, for his daughter Padmaja. |
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