A day after joining the BJP, former Congress leader and daughter of veteran four-time Kerala Chief Minister K. Karunakaran, Padmaja Venugopal on Friday said more leaders from her old party will follow her footsteps.
After joining the BJP in New Delhi on Thursday, she arrived here and was received at the airport by top state BJP leaders. She was later taken to the state party headquarters.
"It was the national leadership of the BJP that contacted me and my only demand to them was that I should be given the freedom to do party work," she said.
"I have been planning to leave the Congress for the past three years. Before I decided to leave, I called (Congress General Secretary, Organisation) K.C. Venugopal, but he did not pick up my call. I will never return to the Congress again," she added.
Padmaja Venugopal also took potshots at her brother K. Muraleedharan, the sitting Lok Sabha member from Badagara in Kozhikode, and asked if she would campaign against him in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, said: "Of course, Yes, if my party asks me to do, I will."
A General Secretary of the Congress and a member of its Political Affairs Committee, she was fielded in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls from Chalakudy and later in the 2016 and 2021 Assembly polls but lost on all three occasions.