Prof. B. Vivekanandan When I look back to 1957, the assumption to power of a popularly elected communist government in Kerala that year was a landmark. Embedded in that development was that, in ideological terms, the Indian Communist Party had accepted the perception, which Karl marx propounded after the violent end of the rise of Paris Commune in 1871, that in pluralist democracies socialism can be ushered in through peaceful democratic means ,without a violent revolution. It also showed the co [...]

The year 1957 is a watershed in the socio-political life of the State of Kerala, as well as India. Eventhough Communists, who represent ideologies which run totally counter to the interests of the ruling class, assuming power through the parliamentary democracy mode, was shocking and surprising to many, it was not acccidental and was part of a historical process. At the international level it was a process spanning over almost two centuries. At the national level it was the end result of imbibin [...]

Prabhat Patnaik The Communist Party, consisting of Marxist revolutionaries who had emerged, to start with, in different parts of British India, had made significant inroads into the princely states by the early 1940s. Telengana, Punnapra-Vyalar, Ranpur and Nilagiri (both in Orissa) illustrated this spread of the Communist movement from British India to the princely states. In the south, in the British Indian territory itself, the Communists were so strong that in the 1952 elections to the Madras [...]

P.Govindan Pillai The Success and the experience of the first communist ministry in Kerala has thus national and international relevance as comrade Jyothi Basu who headed the West Bengal left front ministry for two and a half decades was eminently correct when he said that the first kerala ministry blazed a new trail for India as a whole and Bengal and Tripura in particular. April 5 of 1957 was a red letter day not only in the history of the state of Kerala but also in the Indian union as a whol [...]