‘What is wrong with that?’: Supreme Court stays Kerala HC order stopping LDF govt’s Nava Kerala survey

Taking up the appeal, the CJI asked, “If a state government spends hundreds of crores of rupees on welfare schemes, and eventually…wants to know through an evaluation that have my schemes worked or not…Assuming that elections are there, they want to go before the people that look here, though we have been spending so much on welfare schemes, but we have ultimately found we are at fault at so and so places, we would like to improve, what is wrong with that?”

With the Kerala Assembly elections due in a few months, the programme had come under a cloud as critics alleged that it was an attempt to carry out a political campaign at the expense of the exchequer.

The counsel appearing for the original petitioner said, “The wrong is the government can go, not the party, through the volunteers…The whole ploy is they send party workers to each house.”

He referred to a letter issued by CPI(M) Kerala state secretary M V Govindan on September 23, 2025, more than two weeks before the state cabinet announced the programme on October 10, 2025. The letter asked party cadres “to flood” the ‘Samoohya Sannadha Sena Portal’, from which the volunteers for the Nava Kerala programme were subsequently drawn. The portal was created in 2020 for the specific purpose of forming a social volunteer force to provide assistance in natural disasters in the state and to help in any local crisis.

The high court bench of Chief Justice Soumen Sen and Syam Kumar V M had sought an explanation from Govindan on allegations that there was “inside knowledge” of the programme, passed on to the party.

The party secretary filed a counter-affidavit, which the high court said was “sketchy” and “intentionally overlooked or evasively denied…the veracity and authenticity of the contents of the documents, preceding the announcement of the scheme”.

The high court said the “contentions put forth by the petitioners based on…letter issued by the…party secretary cannot be totally brushed aside. The evasive and non-responsive counter-affidavit” filed by him, “without any tenable explanation as to how the…letter came to be issued to its cadres, much before” the government “order or even before the cabinet decision approving the Nava Keralam Programme on 08.10.2025 gives credence to the allegation that there has been a concerted effort to covertly use the said programme by enabling the party cadres to flood the portal while not giving adequate publicity to the fact that the portal, though created for a different purpose and requiring a different commitment would be used for the Nava Keralam Programme.”

The high court also concluded that “the expenditure incurred in implementation of such programme is in violation of the rules of business” and “the said amount neither could have been allocated nor utilised under the special PR campaign head being not permitted under the rules of business.”