INDIA: About-Face in Kerala

“Resign! Resign!” the pickets had demanded of the Communist government of Kerala, India’s only Red-ruled state. Kerala’s Communist Chief Minister, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, refused even to consider the demands from local Socialist, Moslem and Congress Party groups. Equally implacably, he continued to enforce a law tightening his government’s control of private schools—a measure that had driven Kerala’s numerous Roman Catholics and Hindu Nairs to league against him. In the first eight days of Gandhi-style, “nonviolent” demonstrations against the Reds, Namboodiripad’s police three times fired into crowds, killed twelve people. By late last week, nearly 3,000 demonstrators, peacefully submitting to arrest, jammed Kerala’s jails. But in the end it was not Namboodiripad who gave way but his opposition, which had second thoughts.

The high command of India’s governing Congress Party, after first declaring the agitation against the Reds justified, last week accused its own supporters of responsibility for the violence in Kerala. Namboodiripad had been begging for “that good man,” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, to visit Kerala to see that nonviolence kept from getting more violent. Nehru accepted last week, and the result was bound to help Namboodiripad.

The shock of un-Gandhian bloodshed in Kerala made Congress leaders reverse themselves. The first reason was moral: the realization that to oust a legally installed government by mass defiance would set a bad precedent for Indian democracy. One of India’s most respected leaders, former Governor General C. Rajagopalachari. So, declared that the methods Gandhi used against the British were not justified “when there is a remedy open according to law.” The second reason for the about-face was practical. What had really shaken the Congress Party’s nerve was a Communist threat that, unless the Kerala campaign was called off. well-disciplined Red mobs would launch similar assaults against Congress governments in India’s other 13 states.