Finally, let us take a close look at the tactic of forming State Governments.
As a transitional stage towards a Government of People’s Democracy, CPI started toying with the concept of the so-called Governments of Democratic Unity soon after the 1951 Congress and the 1952 general elections. In February 1952 itself, the party organised a convention of non-Congress MLAs in Madras state and adopted a Resolution on Guiding Principles and the Minimum Programme fora Government of Democratic Unity. The accent of the Minimum Programme was on providing immediate relief to the people and not on introducing any radical measures or offering a consistent and determined opposition to the Centre. The line was elaborated and theorised in the Madurai Congress which called for directing all partial struggles towards installation of Governments of Democratic Unity with a view to giving “an immediate though limited relief to the people”. By June 1954, Ramamurthy had come up with his thesis of formation of a National Front with the Congress Party. Ramamurthy had the backing of the PB and 10 CPI leaders from UP seized upon this thesis and called upon the CEC to develop it into a full-fledged tactical line leading to the establishment of a Government of Peace, Independence and Democracy as the practical realisation of the Government of Democratic Unity,
While the CEC succeeded in keeping the Ramamurthy thesis and its eager extension by the UP leaders at bay for the time being, inspired by the February 1956 CPSU Congress there was soon a stronger clamour for a national government at the Palghat Congress. On the eve of Palghat, Bhawani Sen called for a radical reorganisation of the government, meaning thereby a Congress-CPI coalition government as an emergency alliance to resist the pro-imperialist pro-feudal offensive. In the Congress itself Rajeshwara Rao, PC Joshi, Somnath Lahiri, Bhawani Sen and others presented an alternative line stating that “the CPI believes that as a result of the development of national unity and on the basis of the changed correlation of forces in favour of the progressive forces, an alternative government of national unity can be brought into being.”
The Palghat Congress rejected this alternative line, but by the time the next Congress took place in Amritsar, an extraordinary Congress convened in the backdrop of a raging inter-party debate on the implications of the 1957 Moscow statement and the applicability of the peaceful transition thesis for India, the following paragraph, the most explicit official statement of parliamentary path ever made in the Indian Communist movement, had already found its way to the preamble of the Party Constitution :
“The CPI strives to achieve full Democracy and Socialism by peaceful means. It considers that by developing a powerful mass movement, by winning a majority in Parliament and backing it with mass action, the working class and its alliance can overcome the resistance of the forces of reaction and ensure that Parliament become an instrument of people’s will for effecting fundamental changes in the economic, social and State structure.”
For the majority of CPI leadership, the Kerala experiment was essentially an exercise in peaceful transition through parliamentary path with scopes for providing immediate relief to the people. Immediately after the results were announced, the secretary of the Kerala unit of the party, MN Govindan Nair, told the press, “in our views there is no insurmountable difficulty in having a Communist-led government in the State and a Congress government at the centre”. He concluded the interview by saying that the Communist government would do nothing drastic; it would merely implement the programme of the Congress Party but in a much better and more thorough way. After the formation of the CPI-led government was cleared by the Congress high command, the New Age editorially welcomed the Congress “readiness to accept a Communist-led government in Kerala” as “encouraging signs of sound health of the Indian democracy” (New Age, March 21,1957).
It should also be remembered that the EMS government of 1957 did not ride to power on the crest of any militant peasant upsurge. There has never been a second edition of Punmpara-Vayalar in Kerala and the main movement led by the communists in the 50s was the Aikya Kerala movement leading to the emergence of reorganised Kerala on a linguistic basis on 1 November, 1956.
This ideological and political backdrop of the EMS government was of crucial importance in determining its course. The government did introduce a few progressive reforms in the spheres of agriculture and education and promised to keep the police away from democratic movements. Elaborating his theme of “neutralization of police”, EMS told the press on 23 July, 1957, that his government’s “policy of not using the police force in the suppression of the people’s movements does not mean any weakening of the role of the police in rendering that protection and assistance to the person and property of the owning classes to which they are entitled as the citizens of the State. The government recognises that the right of the toiling classes to resort to collective bargaining and direct action has certain well-defined limits. The essence of these limits is that the direct action should not do violence either to the person or property of the individuals and families of the owning classes.” Gherao as a form of struggle and resistance which became so very popular and common during the mid-60s, had already started surfacing in Kerala, but the EMS government was not to recognize it and gherao was considered well outside the so-called well defined limits.
