LEFT WITH A RIFT

ON OCTOBER 27, 1946, coir workers and agricultural labourers from the rural hamlet of Vayalar in present-day Alappuzha district—mobilised by the Communist Party of India (CPI) and armed with rudimentary weapons—rose against the might of the Travancore princely state. They were protesting against the autocratic rule of diwan Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer, the de facto ruler who sought to keep Travancore out of the Indian Union.

- NIRMAL JOVIAL

The CPI split in 1964 after decades of internal strife, giving rise to the CPI(M). For the next four years, the two Left parties did not jointly commemorate the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising. Since 1968, however, they have come together to honour the martyrs they both claim—a tradition that endured even when they stood on opposing political fronts.

In keeping with this tradition, on October 27 this year, CPI state secretary Binoy Viswam and Kerala Chief Minister and CPI(M) polit bureau member Pinarayi Vijayan shared the same stage in Alappuzha. Although everything appeared cordial, it came barely an hour after the two had held a closed-door meeting to discuss a serious point of contention—a seemingly autocratic decision by Vijayan, taken without consulting the CPI, other allies in the Left Democratic Front (LDF), or even his own party leadership.

That decision concerned signing a memorandum of understanding with the Union government for implementing the PM SHRI project, a centrally sponsored scheme launched in 2022 to upgrade around 14,500 government schools across the country into model institutions. A key condition in the MoU is that the state must implement “all the provisions of the National Education Policy 2020”. The LDF in Kerala has long opposed NEP, describing it as a “centralising and exclusionary” framework that promotes “saffronisation”, corporatisation of education and the erosion of state autonomy. Calling PM SHRI a “backdoor entry” for the NEP, the LDF had resisted signing it so far. However, the Kerala government decided to sign the MoU after Vijayan met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 10.