Govt giving new hope to people: CM

Plans to spend more on agriculture, education, health, and housing

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has said that the Left government in Kerala is hiking its expenditure in agriculture, education, health, and housing and thereby providing a new hope to the people when governments elsewhere choose to withdraw themselves from all sectors.

“At a time when the public sector is sought to be disposed of, we have even been able to get our public sector units to generate profits. Despite sustained efforts to create communal tensions in the State of Tripura and Kerala which are ruled by the Left, the machinations of the communal forces have not been successful,” he said while addressing the South Asia conference of Communist and Left parties here on Saturday.

In India, he said, the Left offered a beacon of hope in testing times. “Be it in challenging communalism or in standing up for the rights of the oppressed and marginalised,” he said, adding they were able to expose the non-performing nature of the Centre and its sheer rhetoric of prosperity which was not supported by facts.

He said the entire South Asia faced similar challenges. If fundamentalism had a communal angle in some countries, including India, it had racial and linguistic angles in other countries. “As communists, it is our responsibility to ensure that there is no threat to peace and progress in our country. We should be able to take up this task with renewed enthusiasm,” he said.

Mr. Vijayan said that authoritarian regimes in many South Asian countries were indulging in gross human rights violations. “People are being alienated in their own lands. They are being forced to prove their patriotism. Yet, the forces that are at the helm turn a deaf ear to these pitched cries. We have a responsibility to champion the rights of the dispossessed,” he said.

Criticising the ‘pseudo-growth’ catalysed by neo-liberalist forces, he said the data was being distorted by these forces to make faulty claims. Mr. Vijayan also used the occasion to expose the plunder of nature done by corporates to maximise profits at the expense of environment.