Congress veteran AK Antony says son Anil, BJP candidate, should lose

Senior Congress leader AK Antony has said he hoped his son and BJP candidate, Anil Antony, loses the Kerala seat he is contesting, for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Addressing a press conference, Antony said that his son's party should lose, and his rival, the Congress candidate in the south Kerala constituency, Anto Antony, should win.

He also termed the act of children of Congress leaders joining the BJP as "wrong."

"The Congress is my religion", Antony said, reacting to repeated queries about his son's politics.

Speaking to reporters in Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram, the Congress veteran also said his party was "continuously fighting against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

"Congress party and Rahul Gandhi are continuously fighting against Modi, BJP, and RSS. I don't think the people of Kerala will take Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's allegations seriously," Antony said, upon being asked to respond to the Chief Minister's allegations, stating the Congress party was not taking a stand on national issues.

"The INDIA bloc is moving forward every day and the BJP is going down. I think it's a chance for us to form the government," he added.

On April 1, Vijayan hit out at Rahul Gandhi for seeking re-election in Wayanad Lok Sabha seat, where he was pitted against Annie Raja of CPI, a party that is a part of the INDIA bloc.

A week later (on April 8), the Kerala Chief Minister alleged that the BJP and the Congress were targeting the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board despite ensuring developments in the constituencies across the state without political considerations.

Addressing reporters as part of an election campaign in Pathanamthitta district, Vijayan said the Congress was acting as an agent for the central investigative agencies which have launched a probe against the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIB) for political purposes.

Later, on Tuesday, the Chief Minister launched yet another attack on the RSS over the controversial film, 'The Kerala Story', alleging it was part of the saffron organisation's agenda to humiliate the state.

He said a "blatant lie" was created in the imagination of certain people and was presented as a film to tarnish the image of the state.