"We were kept in the dark. What kind of government is this?"
These were the two sharp accusations levelled by Communist Party of India (CPI) Kerala Secretary Binoy Viswam in response to the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government's signing of the Pradhan Mantri Schools for Rising India (PM SHRI) scheme—a move that has now bound Kerala to the central government’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
Just weeks ago, leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—including Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan—were adamantly refusing to sign the PM SHRI scheme. They publicly denounced it as a 'Trojan horse' for the NEP, accusing it of harbouring a fascist agenda to inject Hindutva ideology into school curricula. Standing firm with Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, Kerala had largely resisted, with only a few hundred of the scheme’s targeted 14,500 schools nationwide executing the Memorandum of Understanding.
Yet, Viswam revealed to the media, the CPM leadership kept its coalition partners—and the public—entirely in the dark. In a stunning reversal, it quietly changed course and signed the MoU without consultation, exposing a breach of trust at the heart of the LDF.
A 'Profound' Rift Within the Left
The CPI, holding 17 seats and four ministerial portfolios in Kerala’s ruling coalition, felt a profound sense of betrayal from its ideological ally, the CPM—the dominant force in the LDF government. The rift deepened when it emerged that CPM’s own Education Minister, V Sivankutty, had signed the PM SHRI MoU in a cabinet meeting attended by CPI ministers, who were kept completely in the dark.
When the media exposed CPM’s betrayal, CPM national general secretary MA Baby insisted that Kerala would not implement the NEP. Yet, in a meeting with CPI national general secretary D Raja, no resolution emerged—Baby could only express his helplessness. The fracture deepened as Sivankutty defended the move in a press conference, citing acute fund shortages that threatened students’ futures, and pointedly noted that other LDF ministries had quietly accepted central funds—adding insult to the CPI’s ideological injury.
With Chief Minister Vijayan away on a Gulf tour, the crisis simmered. Upon his return, a meeting with Binoy yielded no breakthrough.
Left with no assurances, Binoy has now warned that CPI ministers might boycott the next cabinet meeting—a stark signal of eroding trust and a coalition on the brink.
Meanwhile, the Kerala BJP is hailing the CPM’s capitulation—abandoning its resistance to join the NEP-backed PM SHRI scheme—as a resounding ideological victory.
A Scarlet-Saffron Combine in the Offing?
Curiously, the CPM’s youth and student wings have remained conspicuously absent from any protests, leaving only the CPI’s student and youth fronts to take to the streets against their own government. This solitary agitation not only piles pressure on the LDF leadership but also lays bare the CPM’s apparent acquiescence to the BJP’s agenda.
Political observers in Kerala insist that the state government’s discreet signing of the PM SHRI MoU on 16 October—just six days after Chief Minister Vijayan met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 10 October—cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence.
They further note that, over the past few decades, Vijayan has consolidated near-total control, becoming the authoritarian voice that calls the shots in both the party and the government.
In 2007, with VS Achuthanandan as Chief Minister in the LDF government, the Asian Development Bank loan—originally signed by the Congress-led United Democratic Front in 2002—sparked a bitter internal war. Achuthanandan stalled the projects, denouncing foreign imposition, while CPM state secretary Vijayan’s ally, Finance Minister Thomas Isaac, pushed for acceptance. The clash escalated into public confrontations, signature campaigns, and the temporary expulsion of both leaders from the Politburo.
This episode became a pivotal step in Vijayan’s rise. Though Achuthanandan initially vowed not to repay the loan, the government ultimately relented, placing development funds above ideology. Vijayan’s pragmatic faction triumphed, and in the years that followed, he methodically consolidated power, marginalizing rivals and centralizing authority.
For decades, the CPM and its veteran leaders stood as an unyielding bulwark against neo-liberal plunder and Hindutva’s fascist undertones. Vijayan, however, has carved a divergent path.
Having shattered the party’s long-standing taboo by enabling the once-reviled Asian Development Bank loan, he has since welcomed global consultancies and central agencies—precisely the instruments of capitalist and communal overreach that the CPM once condemned with revolutionary fervour.
Fading Bulwark Against Fascism
On fighting “fascism”, the party’s historical defiance remains etched in public memory. It attempted to enforce the Supreme Court’s Sabarimala verdict, and mobilised mass marches to counter the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's (RSS) blockades. It spearheaded nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), with leaders branding the CAA as the RSS’s blueprint for a 'Hindu Rashtra'. At party congresses, it denounced BJP-RSS rule as neo-fascist and pledged grassroots resistance.
Yet under Vijayan, this defiance has curdled into duplicity. He thunders anti-CAA/NRC resolutions through the Kerala Assembly and publicly rails against the National Education Policy—only to silently green-light loyal ministers to ink central deals, including the PM SHRI.
While the CPM’s national leadership condemns the “hunting” of Maoists, Vijayan pleads with the Union Home Minister for more funds to crush the Maoist “menace.”
This chasm between rhetoric and action lays bare a leadership adrift, bartering ideological purity for political survival.
Analysts offer two explanations. Some point to the Centre’s escalating probes—into Vijayan, his daughter Veena’s alleged kickbacks, and his son’s overseas studies—as leverage forcing compliance. Others see a deeper rot: Vijayan and his inner circle have shed Communist purity, their sole aim now to cling to power and chase an unprecedented third term, which is putting CPI in trouble.
CPI leaders now watch the CPM’s moral authority crumble and quietly position themselves as the coalition’s cleaner conscience—fewer in seats, fiercer in principle, determined not to bleed any more ground. Whatever the cause—blackmail or raw ambition—the BJP’s NEP Trojan horse has done what decades of open warfare never could: it has turned Kerala’s Communists against each other, leaving the once-united Left fractured and fatally compromised.
(Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist from Kerala. He is workers’ rights researcher, forced labour investigator and author of 'Undocumented'. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)