'If it had not been (Major) Sandeep's house, not even a dog would have glanced that way.'
This was how Kerala Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan heaped scorn on Monday on the family of NSG Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who was killed in the Mumbai terror attack during commando operations, igniting a controversy after smarting under the snub from the father of the angry officer when he went to Bangalore to offer his condolences.
The octogenarian Communist Party of India-Marxist leader was turned away from the Bangalore home of Sandeep, a Keralite, on Sunday for what K Unnikrishnan perceived as Kerala government ignoring his son's supreme sacrifice by not making a condolence call in time.
'He (Sandeep's father) says that the Kerala chief minister did not come whereas the Karnataka chief minister came in the morning itself, and that Kerala has ignored him.
He got all worked up over this,' Achuthanandan told television channel Times Now in Thiruvananthapuram.
The chief minister asked, 'Is there a rule that the chief ministers of Kerala and Karnataka should be there at the same time?'
After a pause, the chief minister went on to say, 'If it had not been Sandeep's house, not even a dog would have glanced that way.'
'It is Sandeep's family and that is why we went. A soldier's father should have had the sense to understand that,' the chief minister said.
But Sandeep's father said politicians were under 'compulsions and duress' to express solidarity with the terror victims in an apparent attempt to get political mileage and 'I did not want to respond to them.'