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Doctrines will not save State: Ravi

Thiruvananathapuram: Union Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi has blamed the political leadership of the State for its failure to spur on development.

Inaugurating a function of the department of political science of University of Kerala here on Friday, Mr. Ravi said Kerala owed its current economic status to Gulf remittances and not to political parties or industrial investors. Paying rich tributes to Keralites working in the Gulf, Mr. Ravi said the initial experiments with capital investments from industrial houses like the Birlas and later by the Japanese company Hitachi during the tenure of Communist leader T.V. Thomas as Industries Minister could not be taken forward and time and energy were spent on controversies and mutual recriminations. Successive governments that ruled Kerala lacked continuity in policies and perspectives. Doctrines and dogmatic positions would not save Kerala, he added. Mr. Ravi called for urgent attention to Kerala’s traditional industries which were facing a crisis.

He said the Communist Party could come to power through an election in Kerala in 1957 because Indian democracy was vibrant. Kerala later experimented with coalitions, he said. He recalled the Congress party’s support to foreign investment in the insurance sector during the NDA rule. Despite opposition from people like him, the party decided to support the insurance Bill because it was the outcome of the new economic policies forged by Mr. Manmohan Singh in the 1990s, he said. “We are witnessing the same experiment at the Centre. This can be termed as a social engineering of sorts. In a federal system, political parties which competed at the State level could come together to form coalitions at the Centre,” he said.

G. Gopakumar, head of the political science department, welcomed the gathering. Former M.G. University Vice-Chancellor Cyriac Thomas, former DGP P.J. Alexander, Kerala University pro Vice-Chancellor K. Jayakumar, former heads of the department N.K. Bhaskaran and K. Raman Pillai, and Rajeev Bhargava of the Centre for Studies in Development Societies, New Delhi, attended the function.

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