Vijayan

Thiruvananthapuram, Oct. 7: Professor M.N. Vijayan fought a long battle with cancer, was a heart patient and a bout of fever had left him weak. But he died not in his bed but on a press club dais, his last moments captured on camera.

The death of the 77-year-old orator has set off a blame game in Kerala, with the CPM blaming a close associate of the Marxist sympathiser for his death.

Several channels had telecast the professor’s dying moments on October 3, his eyes rolling, mouth agape as if to take in a gulp of air and then collapsing on the dais.

CPM mouthpiece Deshabhimani said Vijayan Mash — a local variant of master — would still have been alive had his associate, professor S. Sudheesh, not dragged him to the Thrissur Press Club conference.

The party organ said Sudheesh forced the ailing Vijayan to travel 25km to the press club and climb the steep stairs to the conference hall.

Vijayan’s son and two daughters, however, issued a statement today, saying it was their father who had decided to travel the 25km from home and address the news meet.

“It’s better it (the controversy) all ends today,” the statement said.

V.S. Anil Kumar, dean at Kannur University, Sujata, a teacher at Kerala Agriculture University, and sales-tax inspector Sunita said kicking up unnecessary dust over the death would only bury all that their father had tried to uphold in his life.

The provocation for the October 3 conference was a magistrate’s rejection of a defamation suit filed by a pro-CPM outfit against Padhom, a magazine started by Vijayan and Sudheesh.

The Malayalam magazine, highly critical of the CPM’s dominant faction headed by state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, had carried a series of articles against top CPM leaders M.A. Baby and T.M. Thomas Isaac, both ministers now.

It had also attacked the state secretary for taking the party along the wrong course when it should have been at the forefront of the resistance against imperialists.

In a release at the press conference last Wednesday, Vijayan had called for the dismissal of finance minister Isaac. He alleged that Isaac was instrumental in channelling dubious foreign funds for CPM-sponsored grassroots campaigns.

The allegation in Padhom was that Isaac and his friend, professor Richard Franke of Montclair University, had imported the western concept of depoliticising grassroots-level planning in a deliberate bid to sap the communist movement.

Vijayan also believed that CPM leaders had digressed from the revolutionary path and become neo-liberal agents.

After his death, the CPM leadership, after much deliberation, issued a condolence message, merely describing him as “a university teacher”.

The truth is he had been much more to the party.

Although never a member, Vijayan — once a mentor to the CPM state secretary who was his student — had been one of the party’s most eloquent votaries.

But dismayed by the CPM’s “loss of revolutionary zeal”, he had formed the Adhinivesha Prathirodha Samiti — or Anti-Colonial Resistance Committee — in his last years.

Samiti leader V.P. Vasudevan vowed to carry on the fight. “The vituperative campaign, blaming us for the death of Vijayan Mash, will not force us to end our fight against communist imposters,” Vasudevan said.