Word: kerala
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Delhi, Shriman Narayan, general secretary of Nehru's Congress Party, back from a tour of Kerala, reported a "complete breakdown of law and order." Red Minister Namboodiripad was proud of it: he plans, he said, to close many of the state's jails and turn their grounds into public flower gardens. He had already freed many Communists from jail, whatever the charges on which they were convicted...
...Something for Everyone." Working ostentatiously within the legal limits of the Indian constitution, Kerala's Communist bosses have churned out a steady flow of legislation designed, on paper at least, to give something to almost everyone. The Reds' major tactical aim: to create in Kerala an active, working base for the Indian Communist Party, a base modeled to a large degree on Mao Tse-tung's remote redoubt of Yenan, from which Mao won all China...
...Kerala is looking more like Yenan every day. In the countryside, Red-directed "peoples' action committees" assiduously poke their noses into everything from state transportation to the government's "fair price" food shops. When reports reached Kerala's capital of Trivandrum that some of the "action committees" were usurping the functions of the law courts, Communist Chief Minister E.M.S. Namboodiripad replied blandly: "A government is best that rules the least." The "peoples' committees," he told his followers, were the wave of the future...
...Roof. Next, Namboodiripad & Co. set out to cut down the authority of the Kerala state police force. "The police," said Namboodiripad, "have always been used to suppress mass movements of workers and peasants." He ordered them to stand on the sidelines except in cases of "murder, rape, arson or assault...
...inevitable followed. On many tea and rubber plantations, work came almost to a halt. Red labor leaders called flash strikes on the slightest provocation. Plantation managers who balked at the strikers' demands found themselves faced with anarchy. In Kerala's 107° heat, workers surrounded the homes of the managers, cut off their supplies of food and water. On one plantation the workers urinated in all the rain barrels, were defeated only when the plantation manager ripped off the roof of his house and collected rain water in the bedrooms. Loyal workers who tried to smuggle food...