Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the ‘Koothuparamba martyrs’ appeared to have died in vain. Five Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) activists were killed and six injured in Kannur in 1994 when the police opened fire to save the then Cooperation Minister M. V. Raghavan from the wrath of Left activists who were protesting against the government’s decision to allocate a higher percentage of merit seats to the management quota as a precursor of inviting private investment in the State’s higher education sector.
Mr. Chennithala said the recent Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] State conference had made an ‘uncaring’ about-face and invited the private sector to invest in the predominantly public-funded higher education sector.
Mr. Chennithala said propriety demanded that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan apologise to the families of the victims of the Koothuparamba police firing for having goaded impressionable and idealistic youth into the path of violence for a cause the party has now forsaken callously.
