Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the ‘Koothuparamba martyrs’ appeared to have died in vain. Five Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) activists were killed and six injured in Kannur in 1994 when the police opened fire to save the then Cooperation Minister M. V. Raghavan from the wrath of Left activists who were protesting against the government’s decision to allocate a higher percentage of merit seats to the management quota as a precursor of inviting private investment in the State’s higher education sector.
Mr. Chennithala said the recent Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] State conference had made an ‘uncaring’ about-face and invited the private sector to invest in the predominantly public-funded higher education sector.
Mr. Chennithala said propriety demanded that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan apologise to the families of the victims of the Koothuparamba police firing for having goaded impressionable and idealistic youth into the path of violence for a cause the party has now forsaken callously.
‘Wooing private capital’
Mr. Vijayan's alternative political line at the State conference has repudiated everything the CPI(M) and LDF have stood for over the years. He has argued for wooing private capital unabashedly. The party had accepted Mr. Vijayan's line without a murmur of protest.
Scores of Left youth had lost their lives or suffered debilitating injuries in the party's street battles against privatisation of higher education. The CPI(M) had pitilessly used DYFI and SFI youth as suicide squads to stymie the efforts of successive UDF governments to revitalise the State's moribund higher education sector.
Pre-degree board
The CPI(M) had pitted Left youth against the UDF's decision to constitute a pre-degree board when T.M. Jacob was Kerala's Education Minister. Later, the CPI(M) approved the line it had once opposed violently.
The CPI(M) had embraced IMF and ADB, which it had opposed violently. It had directed party workers to tar and feather visiting ADB and IMF officials. Mr. Chennithala said the CPI(M) should apologise to the near and dear ones of the hundreds of youth it had thrown in harm's way for causes it has now rejected as anachronistic.
