Malayalam superstar and BJP leader Suresh Gopi said to THE WEEK that he had been asked “very sincerely by Amit Shah [BJP president] to talk to Pinarayi Vijayan [Kerala CM] to end the cycle of violence in Kannur”.
“Politics should be a race to win. If you need to win, you need to be alive. You cannot run on a demonised track,” said Suresh Gopi.
Killing should not be the agenda of any political party, he said, “It is godly to live and let live. Violence solves nothing.”
Suresh Gopi said that he would visit Kannur, where six people died in political violence in the past four months. “In 1999, when violence in Kannur was at its peak, I had led a delegation of film personalities to Kannur. I had observed a day’s fast in protest of the violence. After that, for three to four years, there was no violence in Kannur,” said Suresh Gopi. “I am planning to do something like that again.”
He said there should be an abrupt halt to violence in Kannur. “Let us stop thinking about violence. Violence and politics don’t go hand in hand. In the race of politics, the result has to be democratic,” said the Rajya Sabha member. He said he would keep the PM apprised of the situation in Kannur.
Suresh Gopi joined the BJP on October 19 in the presence of Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and BJP general secretary Bhupinder Yadav. Said Naqvi, “The BJP will be strengthened further in Kerala by Suresh Gopi’s entry.”
A national award winning actor, Suresh Gopi had been a BJP sympathiser for a while.