work. This was made much easier after 1955, when Khrushchev’s visit
to India and his endorsement of Nehru’s regime allowed the CPI to
abandon its position that ‘independence’ in 1947 had been a false dawn
- ‘yeh azadi jhuta hai’ – with India unable to achieve actual freedom from
imperialist control. Thereafter the CPI was pledged to work within the
Indian Constitution of 1950; it used the radical statements present in the
Constitution to justify their policies. Caste uplift and freedom from
discrimination became central planks of the CPI’s programme and won
many adherents.
In 1957, Kerala provided a large issue that allowed pressure on Nehru
from the Congress right wing, for some time successfully suppressed,
to emerge again. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the Kerala chief minister, had
declared soon after forming his ministry that the CPI would implement
the policies that the Congress governments in the state and at the centre
had made promises to implement but failed to do. But Govind Ballabh
Pant, the home minister, had no intention of allowing communists
to govern on any programme whatsoever. Namboodiripad’s amnesty for
political prisoners, his commutation of death sentences and his banning
of the eviction of tenant farmers by their landlords were not appreciated;
Pant’s instrument in Kerala was the governor of the state, Ramakrishna
Rao, a fellow anti-communist. Nehru, who himself was against the death
penalty but had refrained from speaking out against it in the constitu-
tional debates or afterwards, could only support these measures; but, still
playing intermediary, he intervened to prevent Namboodiripad from
nationalising foreign-owned plantations in Kerala. Nehru was also in
agreement with the Namboodiripad government’s proposed land reform
programmes and education policies (the state of Kerala is the first and only
state to have achieved nearly 100% literacy in India). All of this was most
moderate and Nehruvian, although the CPI’s willingness to take on the
vested interests that the Congress was entangled in and therefore unable
to deal with made these measures appear far more radical. Opposition to
the CPI in Kerala was with some justification characterised as a combi-
nation of upper-caste Nairs and Catholics, powerfully supported by
the church – through which, it is alleged, the CIA channelled funds to
anti-communists – and backed by the Congress.
Nehru’s initial support of the CPI’s democratic right to rule Kerala
was quickly vitiated by the disruptions engineered by his own party, and
by Cold War pressures that took the state of Kerala to be a prophesy of
HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63 231