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percent of Kerala‟s population were Syrian Christians, who
believed that they were descendants of the one hundred Brahmins
whom St. Thomas the Apostle converted to Christianity when he
traveled East after the Resurrection. Structurally–this somewhat
rudimentary argument went–Marxism was a simple substitute for
Christianity Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie,
Heaven with a classless society the Church with the Party, and the
form and purpose of the journey remained similar. An obstacle
race, with a prize at the end. Whereas the Hindu mind had to make
more complex adjustments.
The trouble with this theory was that in Kerala the Syrian
Christians were, by and large, the wealthy, estate-owning
(picklefactory-running), feudal lords, for whom communism
represented a fate worse than death. They had always voted for the
Congress Party.
A second theory claimed that it had to do with the
comparatively high level of literacy in the state. Perhaps. Except
that the high literacy level was largely because of the Communist
movement.
The real secret was that communism crept into Kerala
insidiously. As a reformist movement that never overtly questioned
the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional
community. The Marxists worked from within the communal
divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They
offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and
orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
Though Chacko was not a card-holding member of the Party,
he had been converted early and had remained, through all its
travails, a committed supporter.
He was an undergraduate at Delhi University during the
euphoria of 1957, when the Communists won the State Assembly
elections and Nehru invited them to form a government. Chacko‟s
hero, Comrade E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the flamboyant Brahmin
high priest of Marxism in Kerala, became Chief Minister of the
first ever democratically elected Communist government in the