Privatising education: Will the real CPM please stand up? 

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has given the green signal to bring foreign universities to Kerala. (Representational image)

The five members of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) killed during the November 25, 1994 police firings in Koothuparmabu must be turning in their graves. They had given up their lives protesting the then Kerala government’s (led by the Congress) decision to provide government quota seats in higher education to private management.

Now, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has given the green signal to bring foreign universities to Kerala. When the police fired shots at five DYFI comrades killing them, MV Jayarajan, was DYFI State Joint Secretary. Now, he is a member of the CPM state committee which approved the entry of foreign universities into Kerala's higher education.

The tragic incident at Koothuparambu happened at a time when the CPM opposed the liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation (LPG) policies rolled out by the PV Narasimha Rao government. Those days in Kerala, seeing farmers protesting against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the streets or students against the privatisation of the higher education sector was usual.

But the intervening three decades since have seen policy flipflops as different governments pushed their own agenda in education.

When the CPM returned to power in Kerala in 1996, the EK Nayanar government spearheaded the People's Plan Action, which fortified public education in the state. However, he left higher education untouched and failed to reverse the privatisation drive, which was disappointing for many.

In 2001, when the Congress led by AK Antony came to power, it allowed the private sector to establish self-financing medical, engineering, and other professional colleges in Kerala for the first time. With a certain percentage of seats in these institutions reserved for the government, Antony probably thought this was equivalent to setting up government colleges without spending money. But caught in a legal tangle, his plans failed. The private colleges acted as per their whims and fancies in seat reservation and fee fixing.

Interestingly, Pinarayi Vijayan, the current chief minister of Kerala, held a press conference in 2003 criticising the Antony government's education policy.

"Professional education was now available only to the rich," he had said then.

Later, in 2006, the CPM government led by VS Achuthanandan passed an act to prohibit capitation fee, regulate admission and take other measures to ensure equity and excellence in professional education. However, many of its sections got cancelled by the Kerala High Court.

In 2017, the Pinarayi government replaced the 2006 Act with the Kerala Medical Education (Regulation and Control of Admission to Private Medical Educational Institutions) Act 2017. However, petitions are still being heard in the Supreme Court on the Act.

Meanwhile, in March 2022, CPM Kerala held its state conference in Kochi and presented a document on its vision for a new Kerala.

On page 33, the party says that "Kerala higher education sector should be advanced in par with global level. Research institutes should be started in the state sector, co-operative sector, private sector, and Private Public Partner model."

In short, the CPM was mulling foreign universities opening campuses in Kerala.

Still, it should not be surprising to see the Kerala communists embracing neo-liberal policies. In 2011, a WikiLeak document had details of senior CPM Kerala leaders reportedly pleading for assistance in attracting US private sector investment in the state as early as in 2008.

Be that as it may, the CPM’s central leadership seems to be marching to a different beat. Days after the CPM Kerala unit pitched for foreign investment in higher education in Kerala, in the 23rd Party Congress held in Kannur, the CPM central leadership criticised the privatisation of education in its resolution.

"Private universities, institutions, tutorial, and skill development centres are mushrooming, converting education into a commodity whose access is out of reach for a vast majority of people," the resolution read.

It also slammed the National Education Policy 2020 adopted by the central government, which moots privatisation of education, and attacked the recent move by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led central government to bring foreign universities to India.

A few days after UGC uploaded rules for this move on its website, on January 12, the CPM shared a video on its official Twitter handle, where Abha Dev Habib, Secretary DTF, and Professor in Miranda House, slammed the UGC move as 'bad’.

In the video, Habib raised concerns about the profit-making fee structure allowed for foreign universities and how only the elite class will get admission to such universities.

By sharing Abha's video with CPM's symbol on Twitter, we can confirm that CPM national leadership endorses Abha's stance.

So, is the Kerala government’s pragmatic stance a case of the tail wagging the dog?

Perhaps, not. One final point to note here is that in the mid-1990s when the Communists protested against privatisation and globalisation, the CPM was in power in Kerala, Tripura, and West Bengal and had 32 MPs in Lok Sabha. In 2022, the CPM is in power only in Kerala and the frontline left parties have all of five seats in the Lok Sabha.

Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist and author of Undocumented-Penguin 2021. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.