Legendary Communist leader KR Gowri Amma passes away
(Sourced from PTI)
Kerala's veteran politician and member of the first Communist government headed by EMS Namboodiripad in 1957, KR Gowri Amma died in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday. She was 102 and had been admitted to a private hospital due to age-related ailments. She breathed her last at 7 am on Tuesday while undergoing treatment in the ICU, hospital sources said.
Considered to be among the most powerful women leaders in Kerala, Gowri Amma, as she was fondly called, was the lone surviving member of the first Kerala legislative assembly. After being expelled from the CPI(M) in 1994, Gowri Amma floated a new political outfit, Janathipathiya Samrakshana Samithi (JSS), which became a constituent of the Congress-led UDF in the state.
Gowri Amma was married to the late TV Thomas, who was also her cabinet colleague. She was the revenue minister in EMS Namboodiripad ministry and is credited with playing a key role in bringing the revolutionary Agrarian Relations Bill, which set the ceiling on the amount of land a family could own, paving the way for the landless farmers to claim excess land.
Born on July 14, 1919, in the sleepy Pattanakkad village of coastal Alappuzha to KA Ramanan and Parvathy Amma, Gowri was attracted to politics at a young age. She was jailed in 1948, the year she joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), and defied adversities to build the organization at a time when Congress was at its peak.
Gowri, the tallest woman politician of the state, was elected to the Travancore-Cochin legislative assembly in 1952 and 1954. After her successful foray into the state legislature in 1957 from Cherthala in Alappuzha, there was no looking back. After the split in the Communist Party in 1964, Gowri joined the CPI (Marxist), while her husband remained with the CPI.
