Veteran Communist leader K R. Gouri Amma is no more. Firebrand Communist K.R. Gouri Amma (102) passed away at a private hospital in Thiruvananthapuram on May 11 morning due to age-related ailments.
Gouri Amma has had an exciting and lengthy political career in Kerala as a student leader, trade unionist, kisan and women’s leader and Minister in successive Left-led governments.
Gouri was born on July 14, 1919 to K A Raman and Parvathi Amma as their seventh daughter in Pattanakad village in Alappuzha. She attended schools at Thuravoor and Cherthala and completed graduation from Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam. She also completed her law degree from Government Law College, Ernakulam.
Under the influence of elder brother and trade union leader Sukumaran, she entered politics at a time when women hardly found a place in politics. "After the death of my father, Annan (her brother) would come to my house for lunch. One or two comrades would also come with him. They used to work with Annan in various trade unions. The Communist party did not have many people from the middle class and upper class who were educated at the time. Hence, Annan had to head several trade unions. Annan would stay back for some time after lunch and would talk about Communist and labour movements,” her autobiography says.
She came into the public eye in 1946 as a student activist urging the then princely state of Travancore to join the Indian Union. She participated in student struggles as part of the Quit India movement and became the first woman from the backward-caste Ezhava community to graduate in law.
Except in the first universal suffrage elections in Travancore in 1948 and in the 1977 and 2006 Assembly elections, she was always victorious. She was elected to the Travancore Legislative Assembly in 1952 and 1954 with an overwhelming majority. Gouri Amma gained impressive victories in all other Assembly elections.
She became Revenue Minister in the first Communist ministry in 1957 led by #Comrade EMS Namboodiripad. She was a Minister in Left-led Ministries in Kerala in 1957, 1967, 1980, and 1987. She married Comrade T V Thomas, also a minister in the EMS ministry. After the split in the Communist Party in 1964, Gouri joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Her husband Thomas, stood with the Communist Party of India (CPI) .
She was president of the Kerala Karshaka Sangham (AIKS) from 1960 to 1984 and the Kerala Mahila Sangham from 1967 to 1976. Gowri Amma was jailed in 1948, the year she joined the Communist Party. The party was banned at the time for its 'hostile' stance against the government. Gowri Amma was in prison at the Cherthala police station for six months, after which she was housed at the Central Prison Poojappura. Jailed on a number of occasions for her political activities, she had to undergo “unimaginable torture” at the hands of the police early in her career.
By the late 1980s, Gouri Amma’s reputation as a communist and a feisty, no-nonsense administrator had reached its zenith.
However, in 1994 she was expelled from the CPI(M) on charges of anti-party activities. At that time she was serving as a member of the Secretariat of the CPI(M) Kerala state commitee.
Following this, she established a new political party JSS. JSS later joined the UDF and Gouri became minister of agriculture in the A K Antony and Oommen Chandy ministries.
But in 2016, she severed relations with the UDF. Thereafter, she remained a supporter of the LDF.
A true revolutionary in the full sense of the term, and a real champion of the downtrodden, she was always in the forefront of agitations against oppression, and did not fear to even court arrest and imprisonment, for the successful culmination of the objectives for which she stood. Also widely acclaimed as one of the chief architects of land reforms which heralded the weakening of feudalism in Kerala, Com Gouri Amma is one of the few leaders in the history of Kerala who sacrificed everything in life for the cause of the people.
The AIDWA pays respectful homage to her memory.
Malini Bhattacharya Mariam Dhawale
President General Secretary
