Home

          About Me

One way to think of E M S Namboodiripad, who bowed out of his seven-decade public life in 1996, is an icon of the world communist movement. But a deeper analysis will reveal that EMS is essentially a Kerala Communist.

Kerala’s history is intrinsically linked to this patriarch of the Indian Communism, presently, heading the Guidance Council supervising the People’s Campaign for Ninth Plan, belonging to a now-extinct tribe of scholar-politicians.

Often labelled a dogmatist by his opponents, EMS was, however, instrumental in designing a democratic face for Communism – he led the first democratically-elected Communist Government of the world in 1957.

The pathbreaking reforms initiated by his government thoroughly altered the social landscape of the State. Land reforms and the social security measures were the two aspects which made the widely-acclaimed Kerala model a reality.

Only one cannot say as yet how much of the credit to this go EMS, the leader and how much to the political pragmatism of the party. Leaving behind a comfortable feudal upbringing and opting out for the national movement, the life story of EMS (87) has become a part of the Communist folklore of the State.

His donation of the ancestral property to the party may sound absurd in these times where politics is synonymous with looting of society. Shaped by the values of the national movement, he remains a loner whose colossal present eclipses his Lilliputian opponents and his pale versions in the party. Presently, the Politburo member of CPM, EMS’s prolific pen and untiring oratory skills set the political agenda for the past five decades in the State. He is unrelenting in his assault on the capitalist system.

His unique use of language, some would say he is the best teacher of the party, to sway the minds of the masses has few parallels in the history of the State. As the longest serving general secretary of the CPM in the country, he may have to explain its poor show in the Hindi heartland. And when the Left has been catapulted to the centrestage of national politics by almost a quirk of electoral politics, EMS, the tactician, had long ceased to be his party’s great helmsman.

The monumental volume of literature he has produced for his party over the years leaves one staggering. His analysis of the feudal system in the State is pioneering while his attempts in formulating a Marxian aesthetics is of doubtful value.

The radical changes in the international communist movement have passed him by and he might have been the eternal fence-sitter on sensitive issues of theory and practice.

But he had not been without his moments of self doubt – whether in lying to his mother as a young communist or in thinking on premature retirement at the height of the Sixties. A dogged ‘partyism’ was perhaps his armour against any emotional vagaries of lesser mortals.

The Indian Express

Newsmakers (supplement)

31 December 1996