When I was doing Engineering in Kerala, there were about eight or nine engineering colleges. It was a competitive atmosphere and only students with good rank would get admission. The losers would pay money and get admission in one of the zillion private engineering colleges in Karnataka. Since lot of Mallu money was flowing to other states realization dawned on some enterprising Mallus that they could mint money if they opened private Engineering Colleges in Kerala.
Now every street corner has an Engineering College. Even Kerala State Road Transport Corporation has one. The qualification for admission is that you should not have a tail.
The wealthy Communists first opposed the establishment of private colleges. When that failed they decided to oppose the fee structure and in a spirited display of violence, SFI and DYFI activists threw stones at the police and destroyed KSRTC buses. In the final toll, 141 police officers were injured and 112 vehicles were damaged.
But now some Communists have gone ahead and started an Engineering College and this has caused the DYFI to agitate against CPI(M).
Interestingly, the People’s Arts and Science College, which is the first self-financing college under the CPM, is functioning in the building of the Azhikodan Memorial Library.
The issue is snowballing into a major crisis in the CPM, which has been in the forefront of agitation against self-financing institutions in the State. While the party workers were getting brutally beaten up in the agitation against self-financing institutions, the CPM leaders themselves were starting self-financing colleges, said the DYFI leaders here. [CPM’s self-financing college evokes protest from cadres]
As a demonstration of how democracy works in Communist parties, the mother ship warned the monkey brigade of dire consequences if DYFI continued with its protests against CPI(M). (No more public property for you to destroy, young man).
But then this is not the first time we have seen hypocrisy from the Communists. Isn’t it?
