CPI registers profound disquiet over Kerala government keeping LDF and Cabinet in the dark about PM SHRI MoU

The Communist Party of India (CPI) State secretariat on Friday expressed its “profound disquiet” over the government inking a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Union government to release Prime Minister’s Schools for Rising India (PM SHRI) funds for school education, keeping the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Cabinet “in the dark.”

CPI State secretary Binoy Viswam told a press conference here that the “surreptitious policy reversal” potentially undermined the Left’s national-level resistance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s insidious bid to saffronise schooling.

He said he had recorded the CPI’s deep anguish over the “breach of coalition propriety and an apparent absence of collective responsibility in the Cabinet concerning the crucial decision” in a letter to Left Democratic Front convener T.P. Ramakrishnan.

Mr. Viswam also said he had circulated the letter among the LDF allies, who also felt shut out of the decision.

The CPI also appeared keen to reaffirm its historical role as a pivotal corrective force within the LDF, in the face of ongoing Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) criticism that the party was merely a submissive, subaltern yes-person beholden to the CPI(M) in the ruling coalition.

Mr. Viswam stridently criticised General Education Minister V. Sivankutty for showing “undue haste” in signing the MoU without the Cabinet’s or LDF’s approval. At the same time, he signalled that the CPI was willing to give the government a breather.

Notably, Mr. Viswam welcomed Mr. Sivankutty’s statement that the government would not implement the National Education Policy in Kerala nor allow the Centre to inject “science denial, distortion of history and Sangh Parivar brand of majoritarian nationalism that negates the country’s linguistic, religious, cultural and ethnic diversities” into Kerala’s secular, democratic and progressive pedagogy.

Mr. Viswam stated that the CPI’s State executive would reconsider the matter on October 27.

Mr. Viswam said the Cabinet had deferred the decision on signing up for PM SHRI twice, citing that such a radical policy change, with far-reaching national repercussions, warranted LDF’s approval. 

However, Mr. Sivankutty, he alleged, acted in undue haste and “clandestinely” dispatched a bureaucrat to New Delhi to sign the MoU. “The Minister blindsided the Cabinet and the LDF,” he said.

Mr. Viswam said the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Union government, and the RSS rushed to praise Mr. Sivankutty’s decision. In contrast, the sudden policy turnabout left progressive students, youths and teachers’ organisations resisting the Sangh Parivar’s bid to centralise and saffronise schooling feeling abandoned.

“EMS had famously said praise from class enemies, adulation from the corporate media and endorsement of revanchist forces invariably signalled that he had erred fundamentally as a communist,” Mr Viswam said.

Mr. Viswam reiterated that signing the NEP-linked PM SHRI scheme at an overarching political cost had no financial justification.

“The scheme has no retrospective effect and is due to expire in 2027. Kerala will get meagre funds,” he added.