Kerala,Cong lose a ‘Leader’

Karunakaran had remained a complete acolyte of the Nehru clan through thick and thin,from Jawaharlal Nehru to Sonia Gandhi,until he fell out with Sonia,who declined to endorse his intra-party group machinations and turf battles. He quit the party in 2005 and floated his own outfit,the Democratic Indira Congress (DIC). But that lasted only till he was reluctantly let back into the Congress fold after a couple of years,after much uncharacteristic pleading.

His was a remarkably chequered career straddling some seven decades,marked by both controversies and applause. In the national arena,while he was in the Congress Working Committee for many years,Karunakaran’s moment in the sun came when he prevailed to help make P V Narasimha Rao the prime minister,something he never tired of recounting.

A wily Karunakaran managed to pull along a heavily depleted Congress,cobbling together a coalition of an unlikely bunch of small parties and openly casteist outfits of all hues. He also craftily preserved his party fiefdom in Kerala until his slide and exit,consolidating his ‘group’ and pitting them against rivals on his turf,chiefly A K Antony.

Even as he pioneered many of Kerala’s success stories,including the country’s first greenfield airport in Kochi on the PPP mode and the first government-owned IT park in the country,Karunakaran and controversy were seldom far apart during much of his four stints as CM.

After the Emergency which saw him sweeping to power even as his party collapsed elsewhere,Karunakaran was forced to quit in the wake of the expose of how the police had tortured and killed an engineering student,Rajan,suspecting he was a Naxalite. Karunakaran was the state Home Minister when it happened. Then again,in 1995,he was forced to step down as CM after the ISRO spy scam,which has since been rubbished.

The Palmolein import scandal,which continues to dog his earlier bureaucrat and current CVC P J Thomas,was only the last in this series,which had also included his letting the police loose on suspected Naxalites,regardless of human rights questions.

His fall was perhaps hastened by his attempts to foist his son and daughter on the electorate,and the party. This alienated even his diehard loyalists as much as Karunakaran’s authoritarian style of functioning. His partymen addressed him only as the Leader,and Karunakaran always demanded nothing less than complete loyalty.

Born in Kannur in north Kerala to middle-class parents,Karunakaran had strayed into active politics at a young age in Thrissur,where he was originally sent by his parents to learn drawing. He organised a union at a large textile mill,and later founded what is today the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC).

He was elected to the Thrissur Municipal Corporation in 1945 at the age of 26. He became a member of the erstwhile Cochin Legislative Assembly in 1948 and was thrice a member of the Travancore-Cochin legislative assembly,in 1949,52 and 54. It was Karunakaran who moved a resolution in the Travancore-Cochin assembly for forming the present Kerala state,merging Malabar,then part of Madras state.

He was first elected to the Assembly in 1967. Then,there was no looking back for the leader. Seven consecutive wins from Mala constituency in Thrissur from 1967 to 1991 brought him the title,‘the Pearl of Mala.’ His only electoral debacle in life was in 1996 when he lost the LS elections from Thrissur constituency.

Though he parted ways with the Congress in 2005,he returned two years later,with the intention that his body be draped in the Congress flag during his last journey.