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Kamaraj: The Life and Times of K Kamaraj
Not a keen student, he dropped out of school in Class VI to help out his mother and grandmother raise his younger sister. His father had passed away five years earlier. He picked up a full-time job as a shop assistant, became part of a bhajan mandali roaming around town singing the praises of Lord Karthikeya. Soon he was helping to organise political meetings in his locality and interacting closely with nationalist leaders. Promoting khaddar became his next passion. His Nadar relatives, avid supporters of the Justice Party and the government disliked Kamaraj’s public inclinations but later gave in when they found it impossible to drive him away from the Congress with which his connect only grew stronger. He participated with Gandhi in the Salt Satyagraha. The police even managed to implicate him falsely in various terrorist plots. Rajaji, the main leader of the Congress in Tamil Nadu, resigned from the party in 1942. Rajaji disagreed over launching the Quit India movement and went ahead to broker a deal with the Muslim League, much to the chagrin of his Congress colleagues. Kamaraj now emerged as the undisputed leader of the Madras Provincial Congress. But Rajaji rejoined the party in 1945. Gandhi and Sardar Patel backed Rajaji. The new Congress government of 1946, was divided into the Tamil non-Brahman faction of Kamaraj, the Brahmin faction of Rajaji and the Andhra bloc. The blocs of the Congress were the only opposition that Kamaraj had to face on the eve of Independence, since the Dravidar Kazhagam, under the leadership of E V Ramasamy had begun to shun elections. The Kamaraj faction lost out in the race to lead the Madras presidency to Prakasam from the Telugu faction. Kamaraj was elected to the Constituent Assembly. But the jockeying for power in the Madras province kept Kamaraj so busy that he did not much focus on his role as a member of the Constituent Assembly.
The big conflict between Kamaraj and the Chief Minister, Prakasam happened over the expansion of textile mills. Prakasam, a strong supporter of homespun khaddar, was opposed to the growth of textile mills. Kamaraj, ever the practical man, supported the modernisation and expansion of the textile industry. Kamaraj managed to leverage this issue in easing out Prakasam and getting his own man installed as CM. In his farewell speech, Prakasam acknowledged that it was a mistake for him to have incurred the displeasure of Kamaraj. This perhaps was the first formal admission from within the Congress of Kamaraj’s prowess as an organisation man—someone more powerful than the CM. If one CM did not seem to be able to deliver, Kamaraj had no hesitation in replacing him with another. Kamaraj’s demands were simple: work for the people, shun parochialism, modernise, strengthen the nation. Jeyaraman tells us of how caste and linguistic loyalties emerged as powerful elements during the first General Election in the Madras province. Kamaraj did not fit in here. Under his leadership, the Congress lost. The first non-Congress alliance was formed. Lest it form a government, the Congress high command facilitated the backdoor entry of Rajaji into Madras politics and got him elected as CM. With the formation of Andhra Pradesh in 1953, in a Tamil-dominated province, Kamaraj came back into the reckoning once again. Kamaraj out-manoeuvred Rajaji and became the new CM in 1954. The constructive role played by Kamaraj is very well brought out in this biography. If Tamil Nadu today is a well-developed state of the union, much of the credit goes to the initiatives taken by Kamaraj during his stint as CM as an inveterate promoter of industrialisation. More importantly, he took with him the DK and the DMK, now important political groups in the Tamil regions. The Congress soon adopted many of the policies promoted by Kamaraj for implementation at the national level: Industrialisation, spread of education and special assistance for Dalits.
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The
latest biography of K Kamaraj, very readable, helps us easily grasp
the nitty-gritty details of the making of one of the shrewdest public
figures in twentieth-century India. This would go a long way in
ensuring that we remember how our nation was moulded in its early
years.
