E.M.S. Namboodiripad's Death Anniversary

Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad, popularly known as E.M.S., who passed away on March 19, 1998, in Thiruvananthapuram, aged 88, was an Indian communist leader and theorist who served as chief minister of Kerala state from 1957 to 1959 and from 1967 to 1969.

Namboodiripad was born to an upper-caste Nambdudiri Brahman family in a small village near Perinthalmanna, in what is now central Kerala. He was initially tutored at home in Sanskrit scriptures, especially the Rigveda. He then attended a school founded by the Namboodiri Yogakshema Sabha, a social-reform society that advocated modernized education and criticized the injustices of the caste system. Namboodiripad joined the civil disobedience movement launched by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1932 and was imprisoned for a year by the British government.

Namboodiripad became a member of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, but he soon shifted to the Communist Party of India (CPI). He was elected to the party’s central committee in 1941 and to its politburo in 1951. During that period, he played a key role in formulating party doctrine, and he studied and wrote extensively about the economic and social problems facing Kerala, which included insufficient agricultural output, high unemployment, and overpopulation.

Namboodiripad was elected chief minister of Kerala in 1957. During his tenure he oversaw land reforms, increased salaries for civil servants, and helped attract new private industrial investment to the state. His efforts to require private schools to hire teachers from a government list met with opposition from religious leaders and members of the upper castes, who feared that schools would be used for communist indoctrination. In 1959 the national government in Delhi, fearing that communism would spread beyond Kerala, dismissed the Kerala state government and imposed presidential rule.

In 1960 Namboodiripad was elected to the Kerala legislative assembly, where he served as the leader of the opposition. Internal disputes led to the breakup of the CPI in 1964, and Namboodiripad’s hard-line faction became the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He won another term as chief minister in 1967. In 1969 his coalition split, and he resigned as chief minister to once again become the leader of the opposition in the Kerala legislative assembly. Although he retired from active political life in 1991, he continued to write prolifically about politics.