In February 1994, G. Shaktidharan, then a 30-year-old editor who worked at Deshabhimani, the party’s Malayalam-language mouthpiece, was summoned to the AKG Centre to meet with its seniormost leaders. Among them was the iconic EMS Namboodiripad, who had served as the first non-Congress chief minister of any Indian state. Also in attendance were E.K. Nayanar, who had by then served two terms as chief minister; and P. Karunakaran, Deshabhimani’s general manager. ^[1]

Shaktidharan, known for his high-profile investigations, was asked to look into a controversy that involved the state’s cashew development board. The leaders told him of documents containing evidence against one of the tallest communist leaders in Kerala’s history—K.R. Gouri, popularly known as Gouriamma. She had been ousted from the party a few weeks earlier on allegations of indiscipline and corruption. Rumours had begun to circulate that the Congress, then the ruling party, was wooing her. The CPI(M) desperately needed to counter the controversy and defend itself against her fiery public attacks.

Shaktidharan set about the task. He met with people in the state secretariat who helped him access government files. The files were wrapped in a clean white mundu, loaded into an Ambassador car and driven to AKG Centre. “Gouri was a very important person to the Congress but the leaders of the party made sure to help me with whatever I demanded,” Shaktidharan told me. At AKG Centre, three photostat machines ran overtime to make copies.

The documents pertained to an allegation that some years earlier, as industries minister, Gouri had arm-twisted the Kerala State Cashew Development Corporation into engaging a businessman known as “Chemmeen Cherian” as an agent for the import and export of cashews. They formed part of a larger set of accusations, including the allegation that she had arbitrarily changed suppliers to the corporation, causing a loss in profits. The chairman of the cashew corporation had written to Gouri twice in December 1989, objecting to this move, but received no reply.

The party state secretariat and the national politburo ordered an investigation into the matter in July 1990. It concluded that there was merit in the allegations. Gouri was demoted from the state secretariat to the state committee. ^[2] The party leadership wrote to Nayanar, then the chief minister, asking him to order a government investigation. Gouri, who was also the vigilance minister at the time, was herself forced to order a probe into the matter.

As the issue gathered steam, the Left government was voted out of power, and the new Congress government, under the veteran leader K. Karunakaran, ordered fresh inquiries, even involving the Central Bureau of Investigation. The precise findings of these investigations were not revealed at the time. But some CPI(M) leaders began to believe that Karunakaran was using the findings to manipulate Gouri. On 1 January 1994, the state committee of the CPI(M) expelled Gouri for anti-party activities.

In the days that followed, Gouri lashed back. She addressed a packed press meeting at her house in Alappuzha. She gave interviews claiming, among other things, that the controversial decisions had been taken in Delhi, in EMS’s presence; it was Nayanar himself who had sent her to the national capital for the meeting, she said. Leading newspapers devoted considerable space to Gouri’s statements, making CPI(M) leaders jittery.

In stepped Shaktidharan. Between 4 March and 7 March 1994, he published a series titled “Kashuvandiyude Thodu Polichappol”—When You Skin a Cashew. It was carried with the byline “special correspondent.”

More than two decades later, Shaktidharan told me why he didn’t take credit for those stories. In between receiving the documents and publishing the material, he’d returned to the office and said: “If I am to write, I will have to name others, whom I see as equally involved in this. I have evidence.”

“You need not look at them,” Nayanar shouted at him, displeased. “Do what you are being asked to do.” Shaktidharan said he was uncomfortable with this. “If I just have to do what you are asking me to do, it can’t be printed in my name,” he objected.

Then EMS called Shaktidharan back for a one-on-one meeting. He told Shaktidharan that he was right about the involvement of others. “But the party can’t take that position now,” he said. “Gouriamma is hell bent on destroying the party.”

It was EMS, Shaktidharan said, who told him to use the byline “special correspondent” to assuage his discomfort at being forced to do a political hit job. 

EMS said that once the stories were published, he would compile them in a book, and write a preface to it himself. “EMS was making sure that Gouriamma was politically finished,” Shaktidharan said. According to Shaktidharan, the series was a huge hit. Gouri’s position was destabilised further. But, in Shaktidharan’s eyes, “EMS became a very, very small man.” ^[3]

In this context, the scale of Gouri’s achievement as a woman in Kerala politics truly stands out. She is the most prominent and powerful woman politician the state has ever known. She was the only woman in its first cabinet, in 1957, serving as revenue minister. (For a quarter century after, Kerala had no other woman minister.)

She led six ministries and held more than ten portfolios, including excise, law, agriculture, social welfare and temple administration. She piloted landmark bills into law, including the epoch-making land reforms bill, a women’s commission bill and an anti-corruption bill. She earned a reputation as a brilliant administrator. The fact that Gouri was Ezhava, from a backward caste community, made her achievement all the more singular, because while Ezhavas formed the backbone of the party, it was shaped and dominated by upper caste men. ^[5]

Gouri was a natural candidate for chief ministership in the heyday of her career––so much so that the CPI(M)’s campaign in the 1987 election included slogans and posters advertising her as the CM candidate. It was not to be. On coming to power, the party promoted E.K. Nayanar, a Nair man, to high office. Gouri had to be content with a post in his cabinet.

One rainy evening in May 2016, I knocked on the doors of a modest two-storey house in Chathanadu, in the heart of Alappuzha town, just a stone’s throw away from its beaches and backwaters. Gouri, then 97, lived here with a niece and caretakers. “Not many journalists turn up these days,” Aneesh, the lone security guard posted at the house, told me.

I sat in the portico and waited to be ushered in. After an hour, I was shown into a simply furnished drawing room, whose walls were adorned with several large portraits of Gouri. Gouri herself sat in a wooden settee, her body slight and frail, her hair and clothes unkempt. She was a commanding presence, and evidently displeased by my intrusion.

Her attendants instructed me to sit across the room from her. Her hearing had weakened with age, and I found myself having to shout to introduce myself and ask her questions. I asked if I could move closer to speak to her. She grunted her refusal. Age hadn’t dulled her famously brusque temperament, a trait that some associated with no-nonsense efficiency, and others with a rudeness that was a bad fit for politics.

I asked Gouri about the 1987 election, when she had come so close to the CM chair. “It was understood that I would be made CM if the party wins,” Gouri told me. “The person who didn’t let me be the CM then was E.M. Sankaran Namboodiripad. He said that I am incapable. In my opinion, I wasn’t a bad minister at all. But maybe I wasn’t as smart as EMS.”

But that happy development was an aberration. A subsequent stint in detention turned out to be a nightmare. This time, she recounted in a 2009 interview with the television channel Asianet, “I was brutally beaten. They ripped off my clothes, and I was kicked and tortured.”

Gouri began to fast in protest, and was soon moved to a medical college, and force-fed through a tube. “There was a clamp on my teeth which was screwed to make me open my mouth.” She pointed to one of her teeth and told the interviewer, “That was how this tooth broke.” For 17 days, she alleged, the police force-fed her milk. By then, her health deteriorated and she was moved to a hospital for further treatment. In interviews, Gouri has often said, “If lathis could reproduce, I would have borne many lathi babies.”

The story of how she endured police brutality sealed her place in Kerala politics forever. “She acquired the kind of power that someone who had undergone personal suffering has,” academic Sanal Mohan told me. ^[13] “It steeled her and made her capable of asserting herself.”

In July 1949, the princely states of Travancore and Cochin were merged. The CPI was still a banned organisation, with many of its leaders in prison. Many communists contested a 1951 provincial election as independents. One of these was Gouri, who contested and won from prison. It was the beginning of a string of electoral victories. In 1954, after the ban on the CPI was lifted, she contested and won again, in an election that even the mighty EMS lost.

That was the last election before the formation of Kerala state. It was also the last time the Congress’s dominance could be taken for granted in Kerala. By the time the next election was held, in 1957, Kerala had been born under the aegis of India’s States Reorganisation Act, and the CPI won a majority, gaining 60 of 126 seats and securing the support of five independents.

EMS was sworn in as the new state’s first chief minister, and Gouri was appointed revenue minister. Babu Rajendran, who married Gouri’s niece Ayshabai and also worked as her private secretary for much of her career, told me that her ministerial salary was ₹600 around this time. “From that the party took ₹250,” he said. Though her living and travel expenses were met by the government, he said she had to take money from her family’s agricultural income to meet the expenses of running her office.

Kerala today is frequently held up as a relatively successful model of governance with high literacy, high life expectancy, low infant and maternal mortality, and relatively low poverty. Much of the foundation of that progress was laid during this time, carrying forward the promise of popular cultural and religious movements. Among other measures, the first EMS government overhauled the education system, introduced a more organised and responsive police force and increased the minimum wage in the state. These reforms hold a prominent place in what is today called the “Kerala model.”

More radical and urgent than all these were land reforms. On 11 April 1957, six days after it came to power, the government promulgated an ordinance prohibiting the eviction of tenants from their land. This stripped landlords of some of the power they wielded over farm labourers. Eight months later, on 21 December 1957, the government introduced the Agrarian Relations Bill in the assembly, heralding a new era of land rights in Kerala. Gouri ^[14] tabled that bill in the assembly. “This bill will bring to fruition one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the national movement,” she announced to the assembly, “that every farmer will be given ownership of his land, within the provisions of the Indian constitution.”

This was indeed the promise of the Congress-led freedom movement: that, having uprooted the British, a democratic government would also overturn the ossified misrule of upper caste landlords over millions of impoverished landless labourers. But land reform struggled elsewhere in the country, hamstrung by the Congress’s own conservative landed leaders.

In Kerala, the communist government fixed a ceiling for how much land an individual or family could hold: no more than 15 acres for a five-member family. The excess would be distributed among the landless. By the time the bill was passed in June 1959, it had been discussed for a total of 124 hours over 18 months in the assembly, and a total of 1296 amendments had been considered.

The legislation was viciously attacked by the opposition and the leading newspapers of the day. Two days after the bill was passed, the Congress party and its supporters launched one of the ugliest protests in the history of Kerala, called Vimochanasamaram, or the ‘liberation struggle.’ Notoriously, its slogans were full of caste slurs.

An infamous one went: “Don’t let Gouri Chovvathi rule, let her go spin coir!” using a word meant to insult her Ezhava background. (Kerala remains far from free of this kind of casteism in public life. The current chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, comes from a caste traditionally occupied as toddy tappers. In December 2018, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s mouthpiece Janmabhoomi, opposing the government’s actions to open up the Sabarimala temple to female devotees, published a cartoon captioned: “This is what will happen if power is given to those who should climb coconut trees.”)  Other slogans included “Rowdy Thomma”—short for Thomas—“where are the jobs?” and “What’s in Mundassery’s dumb head? Coir dust or toddy?” ^[15]

The Congress, ruling in Delhi, was shaken by the reforms. The extent of their disquiet became clear in July of 1959, when President Rajendra Prasad dismissed the EMS government on Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s recommendation. With this move, Nehru set a precedent of blatant constitutional misuse, one that other prime ministers would misuse scores of times in the decades to come. In Kerala, it was clear where the people’s sympathies lay. The communists got more votes in the next election in 1960, than it did in 1957. ^[16]

Gouri’s divorce was portrayed as “something huge and shameful,” the Malayali historian and feminist J. Devika noted. But, she said, “it was nothing like that. I call that generation of women swatantryavadis, women who defined freedom. Many of those extremely intelligent women of that generation were spinsters or divorcees, who lived unconventional lives.”

Devika argued that the details of the separation did not matter. “She has herself given three different versions or narratives of her early life and her relationship with T.V. Thomas,” she said. “These sometimes contradictory versions should not matter to us because it doesn’t matter to her.”

“It is an episode that keeps changing colour with every turn and changes in her life,” Devika added. “And also, because memory is such a bitch, telling you different things at different times. People you thought you could never love, people you think you will never manage to forgive, you forgive after some time.” Gouri summed up the relationship in a line in a 2019 interview to Mathruboomi: “That was a relationship that gave me a lot of pain and some happiness.”

In some interviews, Gouri has expressed regret at not having borne a child. Twice, she suffered miscarriages in the early stages of pregnancy. The first time, she has said in an interview, it was because Thomas forced her to travel when she was pregnant. “Though the doctor said not to travel, circumstances were such that I had to travel,” she said. Later in the same interview, she said, “The first time I didn’t want to travel, and T.V. forced me to.”

The second miscarriage, she recalled, “happened after the party split and we were living separately.” That time, she said, “T.V. was very hurt, and scolded me a lot for it. But I wasn’t as hurt by it as the first time I had the miscarriage.” Predictably, inside the state assembly, men often subjected her to hurtful barbs about her inability to bear a biological child.

Gouri and Thomas maintained only sparse contact over the following decades. Thomas died in 1977, after a long battle with cancer. Gouri visited him just before this, after taking permission from her party. “In the end the party committee got together and granted me permission to visit him for two weeks. T.V. wept when I said goodbye. For some reason, I couldn’t cry.”

Mohanachandran’s wife, J. Lalithambika, served as the secretary of the social welfare ministry during this period. “When a file is in front of her, she only looks at the merits of the case to decide, not the politics of it,” Lalithambika said. “She studies the people who work for her and assesses them well, and she prefers the ones who can take judicious decisions and are hardworking and not corrupt.” All the IAS officers I interviewed admired her ability to take quick decisions and stick by them. “She never sat on a file,” I heard often.

Several projects that Gouri kick-started during her ministerial life are now fixtures on Kerala’s socio-economic landscape. Among them are the Trivandrum Technopark, the largest IT park in India, which houses more than 400 companies, and is the facility with the largest employee base in Kerala; the milk cooperative MILMA, modelled after Amul, which has made Kerala self-reliant in milk production; and the Cashew Corporation, which marked the southern district of Kollam out as the cashew capital of the world. ^[19]

G. Vijayaraghavan, the founding CEO of Technopark, echoed the views of civil servants I spoke to. “She was the first chairperson of the Technopark Governing Council,” he wrote in a Facebook post on her birthday in 2020. “She stood by our decisions and did not interfere in any appointments.”

But within the party, Gouri was falling out of favour. “Party discipline was central to the CPI(M) framework, and she was mostly on her own,” Sanal Mohan explained. Gouri, he added, “had the power to not fall in line with the diktats of the party.” M.M. Lawrence, who was the LDF convener then, remembered that she would often speak publicly of matters discussed in the party meetings and take decisions that had not been approved by the party.

Her moves to encourage industrialisation in the state also resulted in frequent clashes with the party’s trade union wing, the CITU, and its leadership. They fell out over issues such as her approval of some large industrial projects, such as the Technopark; and the government’s liquor policy, which brought Kerala out of total prohibition. This was also the fateful period in which she took the decisions for the Cashew Corporation that became the subject of the party’s vitiated investigation in 1994.

Though their differences were well known by this time, the manner in which the party smeared her and then expelled her was more vicious than most observers had expected. In a unanimous resolution passed by the CPI(M)’s  state committee at the end of 1993, the party expelled Gouri after labelling her a “power-hungry politician in search of plum positions, with extreme low standards in her public and political life.”

Gouri firmly believed that EMS himself masterminded the attack on her. “If not for EMS who else was there who hated me so much?” she said in an interview to Manorama News in November 2006. In the same interview, she recounted that at a state committee meeting to discuss disciplinary action against her, EMS’s son had called her a “chovvathi.” Party leaders “said a lot of abusive things to me,” she said. “It was like how Panchali was abused in the Kaurava Sabha,”—a reference to the torment of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. “I left that place saying that I won’t ever come back here.”

Modern India’s history is replete with instances of extraordinary misogyny inflicted on its most prominent women politicians, including Jayalalithaa, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee and Sonia Gandhi. Gouri was perhaps the first to face it within a party whose ideals explicitly uphold the principles of universal human equality.

E.K. Nayanar defended the decision to expel Gouri. “The party is foremost, and individual is secondary here,” he proclaimed in a press conference. He described her as “politically weak”––a demonstrably false statement. Not only had Gouri won 13 out of the 17 elections she had contested, in the very next assembly election after her ouster, Gouri won with a margin of 16,533 votes, four times greater than her margin in 1991, and her career best.

In 2019, the senior journalist B.R.P. Bhaskar, who has covered and analysed Kerala’s political affairs for around 70 years, wrote in the Kochi Post that Gouri “was thrown out of the party because she is a gutsy woman. This secret is now widely known through whispers about her boldness and arrogance.” In a patriarchal world, he noted, “these are attributes which only men are entitled to. In men these are qualities of leadership; in a woman they are signs of impudence and haughtiness. Male chauvinism expects women to meekly follow commands without questioning.”

After her expulsion Gouri, aged 75, formed a new party, the Janadhipathya Samrakshana Samithy (JSS)––the ‘party for the protection of democracy.’ Briefly it looked like the JSS might emerge as a viable alternative to the UDF and LDF. For a while, she was also courted by the Bahujan Samaj Party founder, Kanshi Ram, in his quest for a national third front.

But the JSS never picked up much momentum. In 2001, Gouri decided to join the Congress state government under A.K. Antony as minister for agriculture. Her association with the Congress continued even when Oommen Chandy took over as chief minister mid-term. In his administration, Gouri served as minister for agriculture and coir.

She had tumultuous relationships with other leaders in the party, ^[20] and towards the end of the government’s term, she parted ways with the Congress. She would never again hold a ministerial post. She contested the two following assembly elections, in 2006 and 2011, as a JSS candidate, only to face bitter defeats. After the 2011 loss, she retreated to a life of relative quiet.

In discussing Gouri’s political career, observers sometimes bring up her temperament: what they describe as her thandedam, thanporuma and thanpramanitham—her boldness, her tendency for one-upmanship and her self-aggrandisement. “She had that kind of high-handed behaviour which we do not usually expect from communist leaders,” her party colleague K. Venugopal once told Asianet News. “I don’t have the polish or the acrobatics of the politicians of today,” Gouri wrote in her autobiography. “I am very rough, and this has gained me many enemies, equal to the friends I have.”

Others credit her with defying behaviour that was expected from people of her gender and caste. “She defied and blew into shreds ^[21] this concept of how a lower caste woman should go about her life,” Devika said. “This whole idea of a feminine leader is something that she actually questioned in her public life. In the way she talked, looked, behaved.”

This arguably helped expand the political sphere in Kerala. “That thandedam of hers was a very good thing for women in politics generally, I feel,” Sanal Mohan said. “For good or bad reasons, such individuals could take a position, articulate it, remain with that, and show that they are not expendable, that they still had the power to bounce back.” He believes that Kerala politics is, even today, unable to accommodate outspoken women.

Devika argued that the JSS’s failure was caused by Gouri’s habituation to familiar political structures, rather than any shortcomings of her temperament. “In the mid-1990s, when she formed a new party, a lot of young women joined, thinking that she would do something great,” Devika said. But Gouri could not imagine a new approach for her party and politics.

“They discovered that she would really do nothing. Because her political imagination was all colonised by this standard party reward framework”—the prevailing system whereby leaders would present the demands of the people they represented, and if the party was unable to meet them, it would pacify the representatives with senior leadership positions. “And she tried the same with those women,” Devika said. “Unless you move on from the party with an insight, you get blinded by the light when you enter a free space after being confined in the dark room of the old party system for so long.”

Leena Gita Reghunath is an award-winning journalist based in the US and India. Links to a selection of her works are on her Porterfolio page.