On 7 April, Malayala Manorama hailed the new general secretary as ‘Captain Baby’ on its front page banner, the significance of the usage not lost on the readers. After all, the general secretary towers over a chief minister in the party hierarchy, and ‘Captain’ Vijayan will now have someone ranked above him, in a state where the party is completely beholden to him.
On being asked who will lead the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in the next election, pat came Baby’s reply that Vijayan would, although he repeated in the same breath that the party’s chief ministerial face will be declared only after the election.
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An unlikely Marxist
Marian Alexander Baby was born to a middle-class Latin Christian family at Prakkulam in Kollam. His father P.M. Alexander was the headmaster of a school, and young Baby accompanied his mother Lilly, a housewife, regularly to the St Elizabeth Church.
In an interview to Samakalika Malayalam weekly in 2019, Baby revealed that he even served as the altar boy in the church, though his reading habit gradually weaned him away from faith.
He was soon drawn to the rationalist movement, influenced by the writings of M.C. Joseph, Kuttipuzha Krishna Pillai, A.T. Kovoor and Joseph Edamaruku. The likes of Robert G. Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell, too, left their indelible mark on the young man.
According to Baby, it was a speech of P. Govinda Pillai, the Marxist ideologue, which eventually drove him to the Communist movement. Baby was still in school when he joined the Kerala Students Federation (KSF), the precursor to the Students Federation of India (SFI).
A chance meeting with N. Sreedharan, the Kollam district secretary of CPI(M), where a young Baby confounded him with questions on ideology, is said to have left a profound impression on him.
Baby was elected to the SFI state committee in 1972, and was nominated to the central executive committee of the body in 1974, at its second national conference in Calcutta, where he replaced N. Ram (who later switched over to journalism), among others.
In March 1975, at the Kollam state conference of the SFI, the 20-year-old Baby was elected state president, replacing G. Sudhakaran, with Kodiyeri Balakrishnan named as the general secretary. The imposition of Emergency three months later meant that Baby couldn’t complete his college degree, but it brought the young man to the realisation that politics was his true calling. K. Suresh Kurup, a former SFI colleague who went on to serve twice as the Member of Parliament from Kottayam, recalled that Baby was “an amiable fellow even back then”.
“Kodiyeri Balakrishnan was behind bars under MISA for the whole duration of the Emergency, while Baby was let out after a couple of months, and he kept the student movement afloat in campuses.”
Swift rise
M.A. Baby replaced Prakash Karat as national president of SFI in 1979, at the third all-India conference in Patna, following which he shifted base to New Delhi. He camped in a room at 20, Janpath Road, the Lutyens’ Bungalow allotted to then Alappuzha MP Susheela Gopalan, which also doubled up as the SFI office in the capital. Until then, the SFI was headquartered in Calcutta.
C.P. John, who served as national vice-president of SFI under Baby along with Sitaram Yechury, recollected that Baby travelled the length and breadth of India in second-class compartments during that phase.
Baby served in the position until 1984, and within a couple of years, at the age of 32, he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
In 1987, Baby assumed charge as national president of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), which he held on to, until 1994.
His consecutive term in the Rajya Sabha lasted until 1998, following which he moved back to Kerala.
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Political manoeuvering
Post his DYFI role, Baby did not assume charge of a feeder organisation in the CPI(M). He was drawn to various cultural activities, and struck friendships across the political aisle during his Rajya Sabha tenure.
Baby was also a member of the CPI(M) central secretariat after the 1992 party congress, which got disbanded later on.
M.A. Baby’s admiration for Fidel Castro is legendary—they were supposedly on a first-name basis. Even his beard was seemingly groomed to resemble Castro’s, earning him the moniker ‘Prakkulam Castro’. Post the mid-nineties, when factionalism took root in the CPI(M), Baby grew closer to V.S. Achuthanandan. It meant he found himself in the opposite camp of E.M.S. Namoodiripad, who had mentored him in Delhi.
That, however, didn’t prevent Baby from acting as Achuthanandan’s lieutenant at the Palakkad state conference in 1998, where the powerful CITU faction backed by Namoodiripad was annihilated. Those ousted from the state committee included stalwarts M.M. Lawrence, O. Bharathan, V.B. Cheriyan and K.N. Raveendranath among others.
Namoodiripad passed away a couple of months later in March and, at the 15th party congress later that year, in Calcutta, Baby was tipped to replace the former in the politburo.
That wasn’t to be.
When a factional realignment pitted Achuthanandan against Pinarayi Vijayan, the state secretary, at the turn of the millennium, Baby initially chose to remain neutral. That wouldn’t last long, as Achuthanandan made truce with the CITU faction, amidst Vijayan’s attempts to gain control of the party. Baby came under attack from ‘Berlin’ Kunhananthan Nair, who was leading the charge on behalf of Achuthanandan from one flank, and M.N. Vijayan on the other.
Ahead of the CPI(M) state conference in Malappuram, in 2005, when Achuthanandan attempted to regain control of the party and ended up cutting a sorry figure, Baby was firmly aligned to the Vijayan camp.
Minister for Education
Baby won from Kundara in the 2006 Legislative Assembly election, and served as the high-profile minister of education and culture. He had several run-ins with the Syro-Malabar Church during that term. He piloted a bill for regulating Kerala’s self-financing colleges, inviting the wrath of the Church, before it was struck down by the Kerala High Court.
There was another instance when a school curriculum revision landed Baby in the Church’s crosshairs. A lesson for Class 8 students, titled Mathamillatha Jeevan (life without religion), had to be changed to Vishwasa Swathanthryam (freedom of belief), to calm frayed tempers, and ward off accusations of promoting rationalism.
Baby was accused of fashioning himself on the lines of Joseph Mundassery, Kerala’s first education minister and a literary figure in his own right.
Baby’s contributions to the field of culture included the founding of the Kochi Biennale, which has gone on to become a coveted event in the international art calendar. He brought a number of acclaimed artists and literary figures to the shores of Kerala during this term.
Kollam loss
Baby was re-elected for another term as MLA from Kundara in 2011, but the Left lost a narrow election to the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). In 2012, at the 20th party congress held in Kolkata, Baby finally managed to get himself inducted into the CPI(M) politburo. In the preceding party congress held in Coimbatore, Achuthananthan and Vijayan converged to nominate Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, ahead of Baby.
In 2014, the party prevailed on a hesitant Baby to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Kollam, where the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP)’s N.K. Premachandran—his former ministerial colleague in the LDF—turned out to be his opponent.
Pinarayi Vijayan set about on a bitter personal campaign against Premachandran, whom he qualified as paranaari, a term of abuse in Malayalam, not once but thrice. At Thevalakkara, Vijayan slightly modified it to paramanaari, but the tirade only polarised the electorate in Premachandran’s favour, consigning Baby to a shock defeat.
The defeat shattered Baby, who promptly volunteered to quit as MLA from Kundara, where he trailed Premachandran by close to 7,000 votes. This was shot down by the CPI(M) state committee, especially in a situation where UDF was ruling on a wafer-thin majority of three seats.
Baby didn’t attend the Legislative Assembly session for a week, and when he finally attended, didn’t mark his attendance, making his displeasure with the party public. He skipped many public functions in its aftermath.
Did Baby offer to quit as a mark of protest against Vijayan back then?
Veteran journalist M.G.Radhakrishnan, son of P. Govinda Pillai, reckoned that it was more to do with the latter’s conscience. “There are two kinds of politicians; the ones with a conscience, and others who aren’t troubled by it. Baby probably felt the prick of conscience.”
Drifting apart from Vijayan
M.A. Baby drifted apart from Vijayan after enduring the humiliating loss in Kollam. He made indirect references to Vijayan’s role in his loss, saying how it was important to maintain civility in political discourse. Baby was a peripheral presence on Kerala’s political firmament since then, mostly keeping himself to the boardroom politics of the politburo.
Even then, Baby did speak out on odd occasions, especially during the initial phase of Vijayan’s first term as chief minister, for instance, against the police ill-treatment of Mahija—seeking justice for her slain son, Jishnu Prannoy. He also made statements against the state government’s wanton extermination policy of Maoists, as well as on an affidavit filed by the state government indicting Naxal Verghese as a criminal.
At some point Baby stopped making even such feeble noises, with Vijayan growing larger than the party.
It came as no surprise then that Baby wasn’t the natural choice to stand in for Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, when the latter stepped down as state secretary in 2020. It is well-known in Marxist circles that Vijayan demands absolute loyalty, something Baby can never deign himself to.
LDF convener A. Vijayaraghavan was named acting state secretary in Balakrishnan’s stead. Later, when Balakrishnan passed away in 2022, Baby was once again overlooked, with Vijayan favouring M.V. Govindan for the role, getting the latter to resign as a minister in his cabinet.
In such a scenario, not many expected Baby to get the nod as general secretary.
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A bombshell on 3 April
When the party congress in Madurai kicked off on 2 April, more than one representative attending the event told ThePrint that Brinda Karat was most likely to emerge as general secretary, after being granted an age exemption. Karat had already stated her disinclination to seek an extension, though the Kerala Marxists assumed they could somehow convince her otherwise. N Ram weighed in. “It’s a huge transition for the party, for so many heavyweights to leave the politburo, at once. The Karats took a principled stand”.
However, there is something else that may have tipped the scales in Baby’s favour. On 3 April, a bombshell dropped on the CPI(M), when it was revealed that the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO), under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, booked Veena T. (Pinarayi Vijayan’s daughter), in a bribery case.
According to CPI(M) insiders, that left Vijayan with little options, even if he may have wanted to install someone else.
It was Prakash Karat who proposed Baby’s name as general secretary. The Bengal unit batted for Ashok Dhawale, who, in turn, proposed Mohammed Salim. Soon, it became clear that Baby was not going to be denied his due, after a decade in near-political wilderness in Kerala.
Just a couple of months back, at the state conference of the CPI(M) held in Baby’s native district of Kollam, the veteran was consigned to a vehicle behind Vijayan and state secretary M.V. Govindan.
Ram stated that “Baby is the right person for the job, having come through a strong movement”. Baby’s long apprenticeship as a central committee member apart, he has also served as the Alappuzha district secretary of the CPI(M) in 2002, at the height of factionalism. There he oversaw the construction of the new district headquarters.
Power equations in Kerala
Regardless of Vijayan’s towering presence, Baby’s appointment would definitely make him another power centre in the state.
This is the first instance of someone outside the ‘Kannur lobby’ or Malabar assuming an important role in the party after Achuthanandan. Baby is the second Keralite after EMS Namboodiripad, and third Malayali (Prakash Karat hails from Palakkad though he represented Delhi) to assume the mantle of CPI(M) general secretary.
Baby succeeds Karat who functioned as coordinator following the demise of Sitaram Yechury last year, reminiscent of the change of guard in the SFI in 1979. M.G. Radhakrishnan told ThePrint that he didn’t see Baby rocking the Kerala boat in any way, even if he expected the general secretary to do right by the party whenever the latter had a veto on it.
However, there are others who reckon that Baby has been too timid in recent times, beating around the bush where plainspeak was called for.
Suresh Kurup countered that charge by arguing that “Baby is the most eligible candidate for the role” and that it was only natural for politicians to tone down with age. For someone who bears the weight of his conscience like Jacob Marley in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Baby may be the right person to lead the party through a transformation.
In any case, it would be tad too early to predict Baby’s impact on the party’s fortunes.
Nothing succeeds like success
Back in Kerala, M.A. Baby has been calling on his well-wishers. He has stayed in touch with cultural and literary figures even when he had virtually no say in the running of the Kerala unit of the party.
Poet K. Satchidanandan told ThePrint how Baby persuaded him to stay on as president of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, after coming under vicious attack for speaking his mind.
Baby is married to Betty Louis, a former state committee member of the SFI. According to her, the only gift she ever received from Baby during their courtship days was a booklet of an essay by poet P.B. Shelley titled, The Necessity of Atheism.
When it came to his predecessors Karat and Yechury, both of them served as student union president at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and held impressive academic records, whereas Baby was a college dropout—but that didn’t hold the latter back.
Ram suggested that Baby’s reading habit stood him in good stead.
There are others such as Marxist historian K.N. Panikkar, who wrote that Baby’s rise from a village to the higher echelons of CPI(M) is nothing short of a miracle. As C.P. John of the Communist Marxist Party put it: “In the final analysis, nothing succeeds like success.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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