Letters: Regime changes

The review of Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's book Story of a Death Foretold by Rajat Ghai was very informative. The Cold War saw the superpowers competing over who could steam roll the opposition the most. It started with the brutal suppression of Imre Nagy in Hungary in 1956 by the then Soviet regime of Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Then came the suppression of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the Leonid Brezhnev regime. Anglo-French powers tried to suppress Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime in Egypt in 1956 when he courageously nationalised the Suez Canal. The US did not lag far behind when, in 1961, it tried its best to thwart the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba and the march of the Viet Cong in the 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, though it was unsuccessful in both cases. But the US succeeded in Chile against Salvador Allende.

Interestingly, in 1956 when the crises in Egypt and Hungary took place almost simultaneously, Jawaharlal Nehru criticised fiercely the actions of the Anglo-French venture but he developed cold feet when it came to criticising the Soviet Union's actions against Imre Nagy. Nehru advised Krishna Menon to abstain from voting in the UN Assembly on the resolution against the Soviet Union. Similarly, Indira Gandhi did not allow Asoka Mehta to move a resolution in Parliament condemning the US action against Salvador Allende.

The reviewer, however, writes that the fall of India's first Communist government under E M S Namboodiripad in Kerala was partly engineered by the Eisenhower regime. This is news to many of us who closely followed political events in those days. Could he throw more light on these events?

Nirupam Haldar Kolkata

Rajat Ghai replies: T M Thomas Isaac, a prominent Communist leader of Kerala, academic and finance minister of the state between 2006 and 2011, has intensely researched the subject in his Malayalam book, Vimochana Samarathinte Kaanaapurangal ("Liberation Struggle"), released in 2008. The book was reviewed on February 12, 2008 by C Gouridasan Nair in The Hindu.

According to the review: "Dr. Isaac has traced the American angle by going deep into U.S. State Department records that go to show that the American government of the time was deeply disturbed by the Communist victory in Kerala. Proof for Kerala having been discussed at the top most echelons of the American government can be seen in Note No. 647 written by president Eisenhower stating that the most important part of a report sent to him was about Kerala, that it must be sent to Allen Dulles, the then Director of the CIA, and to U.S. Embassy officials to prepare an action plan.

"The U.S. government had also prepared a dossier about the weaknesses of the Communist government which ran into 482 pages. The entire operation remained a secret probably because then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had earlier objected to such interventions by the CIA in India, says Dr. Isaac."

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