Kerala Left leader MV Raghavan dies

Thiruvananthapuram: MV Ragahavan, firebrand Kerala Left leader, founder of the Communist Marxist Party and former senior leader of the Communist Party of India Marxist, died on Sunday morning. He was 81 and had been suffering from multiple diseases over the past few years.

Ragahavan died at the Pariyaram Medical College, which he founded, and the funeral is scheduled for Monday morning. Raghavan leaves behind his wife C.V. Janaki, a daughter and three sons, including journalists Gireesh Kumar and Nikesh Kumar.

Raghavan’s death follows the demise of Professor B. Hridayakumari, a well-known writer and educationist, on Saturday morning. She was 84. Well-known poet Sugathakumari and writer Sujatha Devi are her siblings. She was cremated on Saturday evening.

Raghavan was the stormy petrel of Communist politics in Kerala, emerging quickly as one of the better-known young communist leaders in the state in the 1970s. He was born in 1933 at Pappinissery in Kannur district to Sankaran Nambiar and Thambayi and went through a childhood marked by financial constraints, which also crippled his schooling years.

He was attracted to communist ideals in his early teens and in 1964, when the Communist Party of India split in two, he joined the Communist Party of India Marxist. From 1967, he was the panchayat president of Pappinissery for more than a decade and a half.

After beginning work as a young teen in the weaving industry, Raghavan’s rise in the political hierarchy was swift. In 1967 he made his first major political mark, becoming the district secretary of the CPM for Kannur, and went on to become an MLA in 1970 from the then constituency of Madayi.

But his troubles within the CPM began in the 1980s, when he backed an alternate thinking that said the main adversary of the CPM was Congress, and that the CPM should align with the Muslim League and the Kerala Congress. That led to his exit from the CPM, and he founded the Communist Marxist Party in 1986.

Few gave the new party any chance of survival, but it lasted nearly three decades until a split only months before his death. The two factions are headed by K.R. Aravindakshan and C.P. John. But by that time, Raghavan had suffered memory loss and the debilitating disease had taken him away from active politics.

Raghavan was a minister in the 1991 K. Karunakaran ministry, the 1995-96 A.K. Antony ministry and the 2004 Oommen Chandy ministry.