Kasaragod: During the politically frosty December, when Governor Arif Mohammed Khan took a jab at Pinarayi Vijayan by saying that his hometown of Kannur has a "bloody history" of killing each other, the Chief Minister hit back with a list of communist freedom fighters from Kannur to hail a history supposedly unknown to the "opportunist" constitutional head.
One of the names Vijayan recalled was of freedom fighter and poet T Subrahmanian Thirumump (1906-1984). The CPM loves to recall him with reverence and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government is building a Rs 51-crore cultural centre in his memory in Kasaragod district.
However, a book by Left historian Ajayakumar Kodoth released in 2021 portrayed Thirumump also as an opportunist whose betrayal helped the Union government declare the Communist Party of India as "unlawful" in the erstwhile Malabar province.
Now, new evidence has come up that Thirumump -- a Sanskrit scholar once extolled by E M S Namboodiripad as the 'Singing Sword' because of his fiery poetry -- squealed on fellow communists after he surrendered before police and even joined the Congress party. In a Congress event in April 1949, Thirumump was quoted calling the many Communist revolutions "absurd" and the undivided Communist party "brain damaged" for its resolution to overthrow Jawaharlal Nehru's government through an armed revolution, a resolution known as 'Calcutta Thesis'. Ironically, Thirumump himself had endorsed the 'Calcutta Thesis' at the CPI's second congress in Calcutta in February 1948, and advocated it after returning to Kasaragod, said Kodoth.
The CPM, however, takes the position that Thirumump retired from politics in 1948 because he disagreed with the 'Calcutta Thesis' and turned to spiritualism. "His political life ended in 1948. He was like Aurobindo Ghosh who was also a revolutionary before turning to spiritualism," said K P Satheesh Chandran, CPM's State Committee member and two-time MLA from Kasaragod's Trikaripur constituency, Thirumump's hometown.
T S Thirumump was the most prominent leader of the early communist peasant movement. He was a poet and cultural leader. He was a leader of the Guruvayur Satyagraha captained by A K Gopalan. "He was born in a high-caste Brahmin family but actively participated in struggles against Brahmanic hegemony," said Satheesh Chandran. He was perhaps the first poet in India to go to jail for writing revolutionary poetry in the 1930s, said Satheesh Chandran, who led the CPM as its Secretary in Kasaragod district for 10 years.
"In 1948, he resigned from the party because he disagreed with Calcutta Thesis. We are highlighting his life till 1948," he said.
That is where the CPM digresses from facts, said Kodoth, who wrote the book 'Gandhian Communisttinoppam Ara Noothandu' ('Half a Century with a Gandhian Communist'), a biography on his father and Thirumump's contemporary K Madhavan (1915-2016).
Thirumump had an outstanding life as a firebrand orator and revolutionary communist leader but his exit from the party and his betrayal of the movement are equally important, said Kodoth. "We can celebrate him but not by sweeping the unpalatable facts under the carpet," said Kodoth, who taught history at Nehru Arts and Science College in Kanhangad.
Train to Calcutta
In 1937, when a unit of Karshaka Sangham -- a peasant movement -- was set up in Kasaragod taluk, T S Thirumump became its first president and Kozhummal Madhavan became the unit's first secretary.
When the CPI was formed in Kerala after the Pinarayi Conference in December 1939, a Kasaragod taluk committee was set up. Thirumump became the taluk committee's first president and Madhavan, known as the 'Gandhian Communist' became the committee's secretary, and remained so for more than two decades.
The two leaders were at the forefront of organising farmers' protests in the Kayyur region where taxes were higher.
In 1948, the CPI delegated Thirumump, Madhavan, and P Ambu Nair, another prominent leader from Kasaragod's Bellikoth, to attend the second party congress held in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) from February 28 to March 6.
But Madhavan's journey was cut short at Kozhikode. He got a secret letter from communist leader P Krishna Pillai asking him to get off the train and go into hiding, said Kodoth. Krishna Pillai had information that B T Ranadive (BTR), slated to be elected as the party's next General Secretary at the Calcutta Congress, would press for an armed revolution against Nehru's government. "Krishna Pillai wanted to protect important leaders from the consequent police crackdown," he said.
The party under Ranadive did pass the Calcutta Thesis against Nehru, "an agent of British imperialism". It was endorsed by Thirumump and P Ambu Nair at the party congress.
In Madhavan's autobiography 'On the Banks of the Thejaswini', he wrote: "The two leaders (Thirumump and Ambu Nair) returned from Calcutta as more sectarian".
Citing an example, Madhavan wrote that in a meeting of the party's Kasaragod taluk committee, CPI leader Kandalottu Kunhambu called for attacking the Kanhangad police station and looting the weapons. "When my father opposed, Thirumump said they should at least launch a token attack on the outpost at Adhur where there were just two policemen because it was the decision of the Malabar committee," said Kodoth referring to his father's autobiography.
(Kandalottu Kunhambu went on to become the Minister for Forest in the K Karunakaran government formed after the Emergency was lifted in 1977.)
When Thirumump returned to Kasaragod from Calcutta -- via Bombay, Kadur, Chikmagalur, and Mangaluru -- he realised police were looking for him.
But he continued to make fiery speeches in party meetings, calling for armed revolution to topple the government, Kodoth wrote in 'Half a Century with a Gandhian Communist' after interviewing the contemporaries of Thirumump.
By May 1948, Thirumump realised he was espousing a lost cause and the police had circled him. He called a meeting with Madhavan at a hideout at Erikulam in Madikai grama panchayat, said Kodoth. "Thirumump appeared upset and wanted to escape to Bangalore with my father," the historian said.
But Madhavan refused to flee saying he never endorsed the Calcutta Thesis. Soon after that meeting, Thirumump surrendered before Cheruvathur police on May 21, 1948.
The surrender and the apology
In July 1948, Inspector General of Police (Madras) C K Vijayaragavan wrote a letter to the Secretary to the Ministry of States (Home) seeking permission to ban the CPI in Madras Province.
He enclosed Thirumump's surrender statement given to the sub-inspector of Cheruvathur Police Station and a report of a Madras Special Branch Superintendent of Police V Ayyaswamy, who interrogated the communist leader. "The government of Madras considers that the material furnished by T S Thirumump is sufficient to declare the party unlawful in the Madras Province, if not throughout India," Vijayaragavan wrote.
Kodoth said he chanced on a file on Thirumump's surrender at the Tamil Nadu Archives in Egmore in 2006 when he was researching his PhD thesis on the 'Communist movement in Malabar'.
In the surrender statement, Thirumump distanced himself from other communist leaders' plans to raid granaries and police stations and loot rice and weapons.
"The resolution drafted by Ranadive was passed unanimously. Even P C Joshi accepted it," Thirumump's three-page surrender statement read. (To be sure, Joshi's resolution that Nehru represented the progressives inside the Congress and the duty of the Communist Party was to successfully carry out the democratic revolution by supporting Nehru was defeated at the party's Central Committee meeting held in Bombay in December 1947.)
In February 1948 at Calcutta, "the speeches that were delivered in the congress supporting (Ranadive's) resolution were a clear call to the party to follow the 'Telangana line', that is, an armed conflict with the government. Examples of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and other European countries and China were quoted to show how the party should proceed," Thirumump's statement read.
He told police that he had his "doubts and suspicions about the wisdom of the party policy" but he did not have "the vision or courage to oppose the resolution in the congress".
The party congress was attended by around 40 persons from Malabar, Cochin, and Travancore. E M S Namboodiripad, C H Kanaran, Kallat Krishnan, P V Kunhiraman Nambiar, K Vasudevan, Muhammad Koya, N C Sekhar were among those from Malabar, he had said.
He said after returning from Calcutta, he explained the party policy to the CPI's Kasaragod Taluk Committee but he advocated for a peaceful protest. Since the shortage of food is the biggest problem in the taluk, he told police that he wanted to organise "people's jathas" to "beg and persuade" the landlords and rich cultivators to part with their surplus rice and paddy.
He told the police that the other comrades, especially those from Malabar, rejected the mild proposal, saying it was not the party line. They wanted to organise "food riots". They said "paddy should be forcibly taken from the houses of janmis (landlords) and if there should be police interference, they must be attacked, disarmed, and arrested, the surrender statement said.
He said he organised peaceful political rallies to collect rice but there were violent foot riots in other parts of Kasaragod taluk.
He felt the dacoities, attack on police, the guerilla tactics, and armed conflicts in North Malabar were quite distasteful and spelt doom for the party and would "plunge the country into unnecessary troubles and anarchy".
But he told police that he got a letter from the District Committee justifying the violence and "accusing the Kasaragod Taluk Communist Party of being reformists and still having the illusion of a Nehru Government".
After that, he decided to sever all connections with the Communist party.
He wrote to the District Collector of South Canara, a copy of which was submitted to the Prime Minister of Madras, declaring his resignation from the party and requesting pardon "for all what I may have done while in the Communist Party".
The snitching and the crackdown
Kodoth said within 48 hours of the arrest of Thirumump, there were widespread raids at communist hideouts in Kasaragod taluk. However, leaders such as K P R Gopalan anticipated the raids after Thirumump's arrest and shifted the leaders out to new locations.
So police could not arrest any leaders but they brutalised the owners of the secret shelters and their families, said Kodoth.
The worst affected area was Madikai grama panchayat -- still a bastion of the CPM. "The irony is the LDF government is building the Rs 51-crore cultural centre in Thirumump's memory at Madikai," he said.
But there is another piece of evidence Kodoth got from the Tamil Nadi Archive. Thirumump told the police that he had received an open handwritten card from Communist leader K A Keraleeyan "directing him to go ahead with the violent programme on Telangana Model". The card was posted at Calicut and "must be with the communist Komel Madhavan", misspelling Kozhummal Madhavan.
"My father was always against violence. To accuse him of possessing the plan for a violent revolution against the government was the biggest betrayal," he said.
To be sure, police arrested Madhavan from a hideout in Velashwaram, a village near Kanhangad, in 1950. He was tortured and put in jail though he did not endorse the Calcutta Thesis.
In 2006, Kodoth said, he took copies of the documents from Thirumump's surrender and returned home. "When I read them out to my father, he just said one word. Liar," the historian.
Thirumump joins Congress
The police celebrated Thirumump's surrender and arranged venues for the gifted orator to speak against the communists. Later, he joined the Congress. "The CPM may not accept it but recently I found a news clip from the archives of Mathrubhumi," he said.
The news clip was dated April 5, 1949 -- nearly a year after Thirumump's surrender. The news clip's headline was 'Political suicide'. Speaking at an event organised by the Congress Committee of Kasaragod's Udma grama panchayat, Hosdurg Taluk Congress president C P Krishnan Nair "welcomed the return of Thirumump back into the Congress".
The next speaker was a person who was recently released from the prison of the Madras Provincial government and a prominent communist leader from this place T Subrahmanian Thirumump, the news clip said.
Thirumump explained the reasons why he snapped all relations with the Communist Party, according to the report. "The Communist Party's dream to overthrow by revolution the nationalist government of the Congress, which freed the country from 200 years of slavery, was because of some brain damage," the report quoted Thirumump.
The Communist Party of India's insurrectional plan to overthrow the Nehru government, which after 1947, won the trust and respect of crores of people, not only explained the political suicide of the party but also damaged the interest and rise of workers, farmers, and the other oppressed classes, he said at the event.
Thirumump explained the absurdity of the revolutions carried out by the Communist Party till then, the report said.
Kodoth said he did not have this news clip while writing the biography in 2021. "This and other news clips from that era would be part of the book's next edition," he said.
He said he had brought most of these facts before Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in 2018.
But the CPM was "highlighting" Thirumump over his contemporaries from Kasaragod because the rest did not join the Marxist party when it was formed in 1964, he said. "The CPM prefers to remember a Thirumump rather than honouring communist leaders who stayed true to the ideology," he said.
