CM Vijayan hits out at Centre over rising fuel prices

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Sunday attacked the central government over rising prices of fuel, saying this is contributing to huge inflation in consumer states like Kerala.

In a Facebook post, the Chief Minister said the prices of petrol, diesel and cooking gas are skyrocketing and blamed the Centre’s deregulation mechanism for it.

”An important argument made when deregulating prices of petrol and diesel was that the gains would be commensurate with the reduction in prices in the international market. But the BJP government adopted a policy of increasing excise duty when prices fell in the international market. As a result, we did not even get the benefit that we would have got from reduction in the international rates,” Vijayan said.

Accusing the BJP government of intensifying the policies of globalisation initiated by the previous Congress governments, Vijayan, who is also a senior Marxist leader, said new taxes have been introduced over the last seven years in the fuel sector under the name of cess and additional special duty.

”The cess and the additional special duty have been increased in such a way that petrol and diesel prices do not fall even if crude oil prices fall,” the Chief Minister said, alleging that the state government is not getting even a fraction of the amount from such increases.

He also alleged that the central government, which says it has no money to provide food and oil subsidies to the common man, is the one that is helping the corporate houses by reducing their taxes.

”The central government is troubling people by slashing subsidies and imposing such a tax burden on them,” the Chief Minister said and added that such a policy was the reason for skyrocketing fuel prices.

He noted that in March alone, petrol prices were hiked by Rs 7.01 per litre and diesel by Rs 5.76 per litre.