India After Gandhi (51 page)

The Kerala unit of the CPI was strongly rooted in the local soil. Its most influential leaders had started life in the Congress, then graduated
leftwards. They started peasant unions to demand security for tenants and labour unions to demand better wages and working conditions for the landless. They instituted ‘reading rooms’ where intellectuals communicated radical ideas to their underprivileged audiences. Theatre and dance were also pressed into the service of left-wing propaganda. Through the late 1930s and beyond the communists made steady gains, their ideas and manifest idealism appealing to a divided society further hit by depression and war.

In a country generally riven by inequality, Kerala still stood out for the oppressiveness of its caste system. Here, the lowest of the low were not merely ‘untouchable’ , but even ‘unseeable’ . When a Namboodiri Brahmin approached, a Paraiya labourer had to cry out in advance, lest the sight of him pollute his superior. Yet the combined efforts of the missionaries, the princes, the caste societies and the communists had seriously undermined traditional structures of authority. In a mere half-century, between 1900 and 1950, defiance had replaced deference as the idiom of social exchange in the Kerala countryside.
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When, after 1947, universal suffrage came to the state, the communists were in a very good position to exploit it. But instead they went underground, following orders from Moscow. They resurfaced in time for the 1952 election, and made a decent showing. Through the 1950s they worked steadily at expanding their influence. In February 1956, less than a year before the Indian general election, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had its 20th Congress. Here Khrushchev famously denounced Stalin, and in passing also endorsed the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism. In the general secretary’s words, ‘The winning of a stable parliamentary majority backed by a mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat and of all the working people could create for the working class of a number of capitalist and former colonial countries the conditions needed to secure fundamental social changes.’
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There would, of course, be no elections in the Soviet Union, but Big Brother now did not mind, indeed perhaps approved of, participation in elections by comrades elsewhere. (This shift was caused in part by imperatives of foreign policy – competing with their fellow superpower for allies, the Russians had to cultivate ex-colonial regimes that were of ten unsympathetic to revolutionary communism.) The communists in Kerala could now throw themselves more energetically into their campaign. Their manifesto declared that they wished only to make this a ‘democratic and prosperous state’ , by starting new industries, increasing
food production, raising wages of workers in factories and farms, nationalizing plantations, building houses and streamlining schools. The party of protest sought to become a party of governance; a transition which, it told the voter, its stewardship of local bodies had prepared it for. As the manifesto declared,

the people also know that the administration of many municipalities and of the Malabar District Board under the leadership of the Communist Party is better than before, and that both the
panchayats
[village councils] which won awards from Prime Minister Nehru for good administration are under the leadership of the Communist Party. These experiences have made it clear that the Communist Party is capable not only of uniting the people for conducting agitation, but that it can also take over and run the administration successfully.
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The newly elected Communist chief minister of Kerala was E. M. S. Namboodiripad. ‘EMS’ , as he was known to foe and friend alike, was a small man, barely five feet tall, but with a deep commitment to his credo, this allied to a fierce intelligence. Born in a Brahmin family, he had donated his ancestral home to the party. He read widely and wrote prodigiously - among his many works was an authoritative history of Kerala. Like Sheikh Abdullah, Master Tara Singh and A. Z. Phizo, EMS was, in this huge country, considered a mere ‘provincial’ leader. Yet he remains a figure of considerable historical interest, because of both the size of his province and the distinctiveness of his politics.
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Virtually the first act of the new government was to commute the sentences of prisoners on death row. Next, cases were withdrawn against those involved in labour disputes or other such ‘political struggles’. More substantive measures were to follow, such as the opening of thousands of ‘fair price’ shops, to aid the distribution of food to the needy in a food-deficient state.
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The communist ministers made an impression with their efficiency, this a stark contrast with the sloth of their Congress counterparts. A liberal monthly praised EMS for his ‘enviable record of public service’, and for choosing as his colleagues ‘people with the sovereign quality of throwing
their minds into joint stock in the hour of deliberation. They will not be simple feeders at the public trough.’
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They weren’t; thus an otherwise congenitally anti-Red weekly was deeply impressed when the irrigation minister, V. R. Krishna Iyer, responded immediately to a call from a remote hamlet where a bund had been breached. The minister ‘at once cut through histour programme, and personally visited the place. He issued orders on the spot for immediate repairs, and personally supervised the carrying out of the job.’ Further, he promised an enquiry into the conduct of those officials whose negligence had endangered the paddy crop.
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By taking office the communists had pledged to work within the framework of the Indian Constitution; by accepting central funds, to abide by the recommendations of the Planning Commission. But there was plenty they could still do within these constraints. For one, they could reform the archaic, inefficient and grossly inequitable system of landholding. Here they had the sanction not just of the Planning Commission and the constitution, but of successive policy documents of the Congress Party itself. These stated a commitment to land reform; a commitment which, as Ronald Herring has noted, ‘did not become operative under any Congress regime but was closely approximated by the reforms of the Communist Party of India in Kerala’.
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The aims of the Agrarian Relations Bill introduced by EMS’s government were modest: not the socialization or collectivization of land, not even the bestowing of land titles to the landless, merely the providing of stability of tenure to the mass of small peasants who cultivated holdings owned by absentee landlords. The bill sought to curb the wide powers of eviction previously enjoyed by landlords, to reduce rates of rent and waive arrears, and to fix a ceiling on ownership and redistribute the surplus land thus garnered. These were important measures, helping hundreds of thousands of poor peasants, but still somewhat short of what the Red catechism prescribed. The contradiction was resolved by recourse to the ‘stages’ theory of classical Marxism. It was argued that rural India was still ‘semi-feudal’. All non-feudal classes were to be rallied around the proposed reforms which, when in place, would unleash agrarian capitalism, the next, necessary stop in the high road to socialism.
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The standard history of Kerala communism is subtitled ‘a study in political adaptation’ (to bourgeois democracy). Reformism in agriculture was one manifestation of this; a second, which must surely have confused the cadres more, was the encouragement of private enterprise.
The party’s manifesto had threatened the nationalization of plantations, many of them foreign-owned. After the election this was quietly abandoned. Then, within its first few months in office, the Kerala government invited India’s largest capitalist house, the Birlas, to setup a rayon factory in Mavoor. The entrepreneurs were assured subsidized supplies of bamboo – to be gifted to the Birlas at one rupee per tonne, when the prevailing market price was perhaps a thousand times as much. This project constituted, on the capitalist’s side, a breaking of ranks, for the Indian industrial class detested the communists. Their hope was that the central government would be likewise exercised by the Red menace; that ‘Home Minister Pant and his New Delhi group [of Congress politicians] comes down on the Kerala Communists with a heavy hand and knocks them out of office’.
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The pragmatic Birlas, however, were responding to the fact that the CPI controlled trade unions in important industrial centres outside Kerala. To start a plant here was to buy peace here – as well as elsewhere. As one columnist archly commented, it was hard to believe that the clan’s patriarch, Ghanshyamdas Birla, had succumbed to the ‘superlative charm of Chief Minister Namboodiripad’; it was more likely that he was ‘getting ready for a Communist triumph in Bengal, where his interests are concentrated’.
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In office, as in opposition, the communists attracted a wide range of interested comment, this ranging from the warmly approbatory to the viciously hostile. There were those who wrote of an emerging new dawn, in terms reminiscent of the opening pages of George Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia
, with its sincere salute to the soul of man under socialism. On the first anniversary of the assumption of office by EMS’s government, a journalist went to a tea shop where

the central figure was the boy serving tea. Most of the discussions were based on rumours. But the boy was always sure of his facts as retailed by ‘Janayugam’, the Communist daily. It was a delight to watch this lad of sixteen arguing with a school-teacher on the wrong side of forty, a NGO (non-gazetted officer)in his twenties and the others in the presence of his boss, the tea-shop owner, and at the same time performing his own duties uninterrupted by the discussion. This can happen only in Kerala.
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On the other side, there was talk of Red terror, with a Kerala newspaper writing in apocalyptic mode of a class war to the finish, with the state taking the side of the lower orders:

If there is a conflict arising between labourers and company managements woe betide the company managements, the police will side with the labour.

If a jenmi [landlord] is so ill-advised as to pick a quarrel with his agricultural labourers, woe unto the jenmi. The police will know what to do . . .

If a howling mass besiege a college or a bishop’s palace, it will be termed as a popular, peaceful and constitutional agitation of aggrieved students . . .
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In the winter of 1957/8 the Hungarian writer George Mikes travelled through India. As a refugee from communism – by then settled comfortably in London –he found ‘the Kerala affair’ most intriguing. ‘What is a democratic Central Government to do with a Communist state?’ he asked. ‘What would the American administration do if California or Wisconsin suddenly – and I admit, somewhat unexpectedly – turned Communist? And again, how is a Communist government itself to behave with democratic overlords sitting on its neck?’
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One cannot say how an American president would have behaved in a similar situation – would he have sent in the Marines? – but in India the prime minister of the day was inclined to wait and watch. For the land reforms proposed by EMS’s government were merely those promised by Congress governments. And the personal integrity of the Kerala ministers was not absent in the best of the Congress Party, such as Jawaharlal Nehru.

More controversial by far were the educational initiatives of the Kerala government. In the summer of 1957 it introduced an Educational Bill aimed at correcting the abuses in privately owned schools and colleges. These were the norm in Kerala, with schools managed by the Church, the Nair Service Society and the SNDP. The bill sought to enhance the status of teachers by checking the powers of the management to hire and fire at will, by setting norms for recruitment, and by prescribing salaries and humane working conditions. It also gave the state the powers to take over schools that did not abide by the bill’s provisions.
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The opposition to the bill was led by the Church, whose own powers – moral as well as material -depended crucially on its control
of educational institutions. The clergy was deeply anti-communist, a sentiment it managed successfully to instil in its flock. In the 1957 election, for example, the CPI had won only 3 out of 18 seats in Kottayam District, the Syrian Christian heartland.
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As it happened, the minister of education, Joseph Mundaserry, had spent decades teaching in a Catholic college in Trichur. He knew the corruptions of the system, and his bill was in some respects a brave attempt to correct them. However, his government sought to go further than modernize the management; it wanted also to introduce changes in the curriculum. New textbooks were prepared which sought subtly – and not so subtly – to present history through communist lenses. The lenses used by Christian pedagogues were ground to a very different specification. Consider these alternative versions of the Russian Revolution, in circulation in the schools of Kerala in these years:

New version:
A republican Government was established under George Lavoff, a member of the Royal Family. It failed to secure popular support and proved incapable of ending the war or of effecting social and economic reforms. At this time, Lenin arrived in Russia and this gave impetus to the Russian people. A new Government with Lenin as President was evolved. First, Lenin made the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Then land and other capital goods were nationalised. All agricultural land was taken away from the landlords and divided among the peasants. All factories became the property of the State. The privileges of the clergy and the nobility were abolished. Mines, railways and banks were taken over by the Government. And thus to the astonishment of all, a new world, based upon Socialism, took shape in Russia and the dreams of Karl Marx were realized in this way.