| | Directors on the board of the CPI(M)’s Kairali TV include an NRI businessman from Dubai, and a hooch baron arrested for selling illicit liquor |
Comrade NRI, meet party-going tycoons
MEANWHILE, notwithstanding ‘‘simple living and high thinking’’slogans, the CPI(M) runs Kerala’s richest political entity. Vijayan refuses to talk of the assets worth Rs 4,000 crore. He insists all party wealth belongs to the ‘‘working class’’.
‘‘Working class’’ is, however, an unusually expansive term. Among the CPI(M)’s business partners are NRI tycoons, big businessmen, even a hooch king. When Kairali TV, now one of Kerala’s leading channels, was set up by the party a half-decade ago, P.V. Abdul Wahab of the Dubai-based Peevees Group put in money and became a director.
Interestingly, Wahab — whose business extends from trading to real estate, Bahrain to Saudi Arabia — became a Rajya Sabha member in 2004 courtesy the Muslim League. A faction of the DYFI filed a complaint, saying he was an NRI and so ineligible to stand for election in India. The CPI(M) establishment was livid at ‘‘dissidence’’ against a director of the party’s television network.
Three years ago, following some deaths in a hooch tragedy in Kerala, one Manichan was arrested. As it happened, he too was a director of Kairali TV. In seeking investment, Vijayan and his merry men have been quite pluralistic.
Much of the comrades’ recent investment has been channelled through private front companies, which usually list as directors party functionaries who also happen to be running CPI(M)-sponsored cooperatives. The cooperative societies then fork out hefty contributions to the company as investment.
The resource base is huge. In Kannur alone, the CPI(M) boasts 200 cooperatives. The only hitch is, if the business collapses, the worst hit will be the working class. These cooperatives, after all, draw from a pool collected from worker-members.
Now the party is planning a network of professional colleges, still undecided whether it should begin with one devoted to engineering or medicine. Also in the works is a Rs 10 crore hypermart in Tellicherry.
Capitalist contradictions
IT may be pointed out the CPI(M) had decided some time ago to eschew bourgeois investment. It had denied plans to touch the stock market. In April, E. Narayanan, chairman of the party’s showpiece rubber cooperative RUBCO — turnover: Rs 450 crore — announced this was the state secretariat’s decision.
However, Narayan, who heads the party’s in-house business development cell, was clear this would not affect existing shareholders in CPI(M) businesses. There already seems to have been a rethink. Speaking to The Sunday Express, CPI(M) central committee member M.A. Baby said local promoters of party-sponsored projects would continue to decide how to raise funds.
The big project for the moment is the amusement park in Kannur’s Parassinikadavu. ‘‘It is too early to say when we will begin getting back our investment,’’ grins the secretary of a cooperative society that has contributed to the park’s Rs 25 crore phase I budget, ‘‘we hope it will.’’
Before that the party has to iron out some contradictions. The CPI(M) has been leading the protests against the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada, Paalakkad, on the grounds that the soft drink company is exploiting the area’s drinking water. But now it faces the same charge in Parassinikadavu, where its water theme park is predicted to guzzle millions of litres of water.
‘‘The party will probably use the same High Court judgement that allowed Coca-Cola to continue in Plachimada as a precedent to run its own water park,’’ points out an activist of the Kannur District Environment Committee.
Coca-Cola and communism, two entities united by the colour red. In Kerala, God’s own country, it would be a nice fit.