The world is always a late Latif. It heard of E.M.S. Namboodiripad for the first time only when, under his leadership, the Communist Party won the assembly elections in Kerala in 1957 and formed the state government. It was supposedly an unprecedented event, Communists winning a free democratic poll.

Political pundits sat up. For the Congress, the shock was akin to that unleashed by a nuclear implosion. During the two years EMS was in charge of Kerala administration, he initiated reforms in education and the land- tenure system which both frightened and alienated the entrenched classes. The dismissal of his government, in 1959, is one of the darkest spots in the annals of Independent India. EMS had to go but the dignity he exhibited in the two years he was Kerala's chief minister enabled the Communist movement in India to gain fresh momentum. In the 1962 national elections the Communists claimed close to 10 per cent of the votes cast.

EMS was much more than a garden variety of a Communist agitator though. He pioneered the agitation of the low-caste Ezhavas in Kerala against the taboos enforced on them by the richer classes. He was also at the head of the movement for Aikya Kerala or United Kerala, which succeeded within five years of Independence in bringing into a common administration the territories formerly belonging to the princely orders and those that were under direct British governance.

There was a mystique of an instant communication between EMS and Kerala's masses. Fractured politics, which have held sway in Kerala in the past quarter of a century, has stalled the advance of the Communists in the state, the reverence for EMS is nonetheless undimmed. Frustrated adversaries called him the Mahatma. Ironically, the sobriquet fitted well. And yet as a practical politician EMS revelled in weaving stratagems for wresting political initiatives for his party at the state level.

He was equally indispensable in national politics and was general secretary of the CPI(M) for at least 10 years. An ardent believer in party discipline, he still had great faith in democratic values, loving controversy and exchange of polemics with the bourgeois press.

He sought an overhaul of the Indian Constitution, thereby shifting the balance of Centre-state relations in favour of the states. He was also involved in the effort to revive the panchayat system. EMS' devotion to scholarship was great. He was never away from the hurly-burly of political clashes nonetheless found time to think and write on issues of national relevance. A scholar, who was also an agitator, or an agitator who was simultaneously a scholar: it is difficult to make up one's mind. Marx, Engels and Lenin led agitations and plotted revolutions but they also read enormously and wrote enormously. EMS showed again the importance of such a dual role for a Marxist revolutionary, his impact validating the judgement that communism will continue to be a force in the next millennium.

Dr Ashok Mitra is a former Rajya Sabha member and was chairman, Parliament's Standing Committee on Industry and Commerce. He has authored Calcutta Diary and Terms of Trade and Class Relations.