The Hindu : Karat blames lack of vigil for funding row

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 22, 2004

Kerala

Kerala

Karat blames lack of vigil for funding row

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, FEB. 21. The CPI(M) politburo member, Prakash Karat, has said that party workers active in the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) had erred in not informing the party about the foreign fund angle of the projects it had taken up through its technology arm the Integrated Rural Technology Centre (IRTC).

Addressing the closed-door southern regional convention of middle and lower level party functionaries here today, Mr. Karat said the CPI(M) does not approve of any organisation having links with the party accepting foreign funds. The KSSP had taken up the Dutch Government aided research project through the Centre for Development Studies (CDS). When the proposal came up, party activists in the KSSP should have raised objections and reported the matter to the party. The West Bengal Government had refused to take some loans from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) because the ADB authorities insisted on seeing the budget estimates and other documents of the Government, he said.

The CPI(M) leader said T. M. Thomas Isaac had erred in not having made it clear that the views expressed in a paper he had co-authored with a foreign academic, Patrick Heller, did not reflect the views of the CPI(M). Dr. Isaac had been told about it and he had promised to rectify his mistake.

Mr. Karat said the CPI(M) did not consider the People's Plan Campaign to be an alternative to globalisation. If anyone has tried to project the Plan Campaign thus, they have erred.

On the allegation that Richard Franke, professor of anthropology, Mont Claire University, was a CIA agent, Mr. Karat said enquiries conducted by the party did not reveal any such link. Prof. Franke, he said, did not have the kind of links that the journal Padhom had attributed to him, the CPI(M) leader said.

The convention, in which members of the party State committee, district, area and local committees of southern districts participated, was organised to brief the middle and lower level leaders posted on the steps taken to resolve the polemical debate on the People's Plan Campaign within and outside the party. Mr. Karat would address similar conventions at Kochi and Kozhikode in the coming two days.

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