New Delhi: Former Kerala legislator A P Abdullakutty has formally joined the BJP a few weeks after he was expelled by the Congress. He took the party membership from BJP working president J P Nadda at a function here on Wednesday evening.
Union minister of state V Muraleedharan and Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar were present.
Abdullakutty, an ex-MP of the CPM, was thrown out of the Congress early this month after praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the BJP-led NDA's massive victory in the Lok Sabha election.
In his Facebook post titled "On Narendra Modi's impressive victory", Abdullakutty had noted that the victory of the BJP was due to Modi's development agenda. He also said the secret of the PM's success was that he had adopted Gandhian values in his governance.
Abdullakutty also hailed the Centre's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which envisages cleaning up India's cities, towns and rural areas and to eliminate open defecation through construction of household-owned and community-owned toilets.
In 2009, Abdullakutty was sacked from the CPM for violating party discipline by praising Modi when the latter was still the Gujarat chief minister. Abdullakutty had served as MP from Kannur in 1999 and 2004. He joined the Congress after his expulsion from the CPM.
Abdullakutty, who rose up the ranks through the SFI, had won the Kannur Assembly seat in 2009 (in a by-election) and repeated the feat in 2011 as a Congress candidate. However, in 2016, he lost to CPM's A M Shamseer in Thalassery.
