March 30, 1998

By K Govindan Kutty

(1909-1998)

A few hours before he died on the afternoon of March 19, E.M.S. Namboodiripad was witness to what he would have conceivably loathed most in his life: the BJP's ascent to power. It had been branded the main enemy of the CPI(M), of which he was the general secretary until 1992. And now, the enemy was winning. For the millionth time in the course of his ceaseless politico-literary outbursts against it, he berated in what was to be his last book review all that went by the name of Hindutva. Its eventual victory must have made him sad but not quite surprised in the 89th year of his life.

Much had already happened that blackened his red dreams. What was known as the communist fatherland crumbled. Many communist parties chose to be known by other names after a protracted experiment with revolution. The ideological movement with which EMS grew up never really grew beyond the borders of two-and-a-half states of India even after six decades. That was more than enough to shake anyone with a robust mental build, and inspire acute cynicism all around. Remarkably, that did not happen in his case. One thing EMS never became was a cynic. His concern for poor people, and his hope that tomorrow would be theirs, never dimmed a shade. If there was anything dim about it, it was his dialectical diction that had somewhat lost its verve through overuse.

For six decades and a half, whether in or out of power, EMS was a frame of social and intellectual reference. Often, it was what he said that set the tone of political discourse. And nothing he ever said went without provoking a pervasive reaction, whether hostile or hysterical. This was a quality he possessed right from when he entered public life, giving up not only his enormous inherited property but also the mental encumbrance of the supremacy of the caste in which he was born. The man who ended up debunking Hindutva had in fact begun his life with a study of Hindu scriptures and Vedas, stretching over several years. Such study had done little to refine the life of the student. Which was why EMS set out 70 years ago to "make Namboodiris men", telling them to hell with their obscurantism and forcing them to allow remarriage of widows. That mutiny against the guardians of tradition in his own Brahmin tribe saw EMS instantly becoming its leader. And he remained a leader ever since.

A man who stammered as he did could not have become an orator known for his dazzling eloquence. For its lack, EMS had something else in abundance: wit and erudition. Asked once what he felt when he stammered, his cryptic answer was that he stammered only when he spoke. A peaceable man like him was an unlikely communist who would exhort the toiling masses to join an armed insurrection against the ruling classes. Yet EMS was among the architects and interpreters of all his party's changing theories of revolution. He had the best of the bourgeois in him; he was also the best adopted son of the working class. Naturally, he emerged as his party's choice for chief ministership of Kerala in 1957 when it created world communist history by winning power through an election, rather than seizing it through an uprising.

As a winner of power, he was illustrious. To win it he would employ all useful tactics, the end always justifying the means. When comrades asked how a communist party could adopt what was derisively called the parliamentary path, he had a clever answer: that was one good way to expose the inadequacies of bourgeois parliaments. As for bestowing sanctity on bourgeois institutions, he said it was all a tactical show before wrecking such institutions from within. He had once taken on the courts saying they merely dispensed bourgeois justice. Time was when he declared that he would ally with the devil to defeat the Congress, which then represented the ruling class. And thus, in the '60s, he started off in Kerala a political fashion of coalition governments which India was to adopt several years later. His problem was that he could never sustain the coalitions he put together. He couldn't care less. He was a pioneer, not a preserver.

Eighty-nine years are too long to let anyone remain hidebound in consistencies. EMS was never a compulsive prisoner of consistencies. As his critics and comrades both say in a tone of adulation, there is perhaps no political statement of his that EMS did not contradict later. What did not change ever was his concern for the wretched of the earth and his commitment to a movement that sought to vest a measure of dignity in little dark men who used to be driven like cattle in the fields of Kuttanad. EMS would be remembered for those concerns, only them.

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