Reviled and respected alike

Communist Marxist Party leader M.V. Raghavan was a leader who was reviled and respected all at once.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Raghavan came to be identified with political violence, with vendetta as its key.

He came to be despised by his erstwhile colleagues in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for using the iron fist to put down erring comrades. Yet, he was respected for his fierce adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles.

Ironically, Mr. Raghavan had to live by the same principles of political violence after being thrown out of the CPI(M) in a survival game and for having dared the “infallible” leaders of that time such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad by propounding the “alternative line” or “Badal Rekha” as it came to be known.

There could be no better tribute to MVR — the three letter acronym by which Mr. Raghavan came to be feared and loved by foes and friends — than the fact that the CPI(M) leadership quietly adopted his line by striking alliances with motley minority groups against parties such as the Indian Union Muslim League .

Ironically again, MVR owes his political survival to the very man whom he hunted down as a Marxist leader – K. Karunakaran. Without Karunakaran’s active support, the CMP would not have found a political space.

The late leader used MVR as a mirror against the CPI(M), administering it with it its own medicine — political violence. The attempts to capture the AKG memorial hospital in Kannur and the Koothuparamba police firing, etc., only showed the singular nature of the CPI(M) attitude towards him for having remained politically relevant.

Electorally, MVR could be called a “migratory bird.” He never bothered to develop a pocket borough and kept shifting his constituency. He represented the erstwhile Madayi seat, Payyannur, Taliparamba, and Koothuparamba in his innings as a CPI(M) leader and the Azhikode, Kazhakuttam, and Thiruvananthapuram West as a UDF partner.

As an administrator, MVR proved to be a visionary. His Marxist leanings did not stop him from tapping the winds of change in the economic policies. The Pariyaram medical science academy is one landmark he has left behind for posterity. The concept of a medical college in the cooperative sector later came to be widely implemented. MVR was also the originator of the Vizhinjam deep-sea container terminal. The CMP’s politics always revolved around the redoubtable personality of MVR. This was perhaps one of the reasons why the party he founded with the assistance of a handful of youngsters failed to survive a period without him and split during his lifetime.