The transformative phase of politics in Kerala shifting away from ideological paradigms surged with the announcement by the state BJP President Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Sunday that Thiruvananthapuram would be home to one of India’s first university townships. 

The BJP has literally co-opted a flagship of the previous Left Democratic Front government led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan whose crowning glory just before meeting the train crash in the last state election in May and abdicating power was the policy decision to fast-track Vizhinjam port-led industrialisation anchored on the development of a 62-kilometre corridor from Vizhinjam to Navaikulam linked to the deep-sea port as industrial, commercial and service-related sectors, including an IT integrated hub called Neopolis.   

The hankering for good education as the key to a better life for children is no more a middle class (‘bourgeois’) phenomenon in Kerala. While the middle class parent has an option to muster the financial resources to send children to other states or abroad, given the deplorable state of affairs in higher education in the state where ‘politicisation’ has created havoc, the lower classes do not have that luxury. And there is growing frustration on that score. 

At a recent colloquium in Kottayam with post-graduate students preparing for the civil service examination, almost entirely drawn from poor families in rural areas, whose only assets are their bright minds and aspirations for a better life, they poured out their sorrows that the ‘coaching classes’ for training candidates for the civil services examination are unaffordable due to high tuition fees and other overheads. Successive state governments ignored their plight. 

Suffice it to say, the BJP has done a smart thing by zeroing in on the education sector as a visible template of its political platform in Kerala. Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s announcement will go a long way to moderate the perception of its religion-based politics, which........

© Eurasia Review