Thiruvananthapuram
In an unusual protest, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, his cabinet colleagues and party leaders observed a daylong strike on Friday against the federal Bharatiya Janata Party government’s move to “destroy” the cooperative sector.
The protest was chiefly directed at the federal government’s decision not to let cooperative banks be part of the currency-changing exercise that is now being done by the mainline commercial banks in the country.
Kerala’s Left and Congress leaders believe this is an attempt by the BJP to destroy the cooperative sector.
The strike was supported by the opposition Congress party, though its leaders did not join the Left leaders in the sit-in strike.
The leaders sat in protest in front of the local office of India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India in the state capital.
“Cooperative banks are a part of the common man’s daily life. From birth to death, cooperative banks are the institutions that the common man finds easiest to get a loan from. There are many who start a deposit in a cooperative institution from the time a child is born in the family. The stance of the federal government against the cooperative banks cannot be seen as normal procedure”, Vijayan said.
Communist Party of India Marxist veteran and former chief minister, V.S. Achuthanandan also criticised the federal government for its move to check the functioning of the cooperative banking sector.
“The kind of steps prime minister Narendra Modi has taken is what is called a Tuglaq-like reform. In fact, Modi is trying to be Tuglaq’s guru”, Achuthanandan said.
Supporting the strike, Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala demanded that the “federal government must take steps at least now to resolve the trouble the common man has been put into through the demonetisation of high-denomination currencies”.
