Chirakkal, on the Malabar coast

Chirakkal, just north of Kannur town on the Malabar coast, was once the seat of a small princely house and is today an ordinary suburb of temple tanks, tiled roofs and coconut gardens. It was here, on 5 July 1918, that Kannoth Karunakaran was born, in a district still governed as part of the Madras Presidency of British India. Nothing about the household suggested a political dynasty. His father earned a modest living as a record keeper in the Malabar district administration, and the family belonged to the traditional temple-service community of the region. Yet from that ordinary north Kerala village came the man who would run the state's government four separate times and be known to two generations of Congress workers simply as the Leader.

The Malabar of his boyhood was a politically charged place. The nationalist movement, the temple entry agitations, the peasant unrest of the north and the early growth of the Communist movement all ran through those coastal taluks in the 1930s and 1940s. Karunakaran came to politics not through university debate but through trade unionism, organising working people in the years before independence. It gave him a lasting instinct for the mechanics of loyalty, patronage and organisation, which would prove more useful to him over a long career than any gift for oratory.

The long apprenticeship

Electoral success did not come quickly. His first contest, in 1957, ended in defeat by roughly two thousand votes. He had to wait until 1965 for his breakthrough, when he took the Mala constituency in Thrissur district, wresting a seat with a strong Left tradition by a margin of more than three thousand votes. Mala then became his fortress. He was returned from it in election after election, holding the seat through seven consecutive terms in the Kerala Legislative Assembly across nearly three decades.

His first real hold on power came not as chief minister but as home minister. From March 1973 until March 1977 he held the home portfolio in the coalition government led by C. Achutha Menon, a Communist Party of India chief minister supported by the Congress. Those were the years of the Emergency, declared in June 1975, and the police machinery of Kerala reported to Karunakaran. It made him formidable, and it left a mark on his record that he could never entirely wash off.

Four times Chief Minister

When the Congress-led front won the 1977 election he finally became Chief Minister of Kerala, sworn in on 25 March 1977. The ministry lasted a month. In April the Kerala High Court heard a habeas corpus petition brought by Eachara Warrier, the father of P. Rajan, an engineering student picked up by the police in March 1976 and never seen again. The proceedings established that the young man had died in custody, and that the government's account of the matter did not stand. Karunakaran resigned on 25 April 1977, a month into the office he had waited twenty years to reach.

He came back. He was Chief Minister again from 28 December 1981 to 17 March 1982, and then, after fresh elections, from 24 May 1982 to 25 March 1987, the only full term he ever completed. His fourth and final tenure ran from 24 June 1991 to 16 March 1995. Across those years he built and rebuilt the United Democratic Front, the Congress-led alliance that has alternated in power with the Left front for half a century, and he did it through a genius for coalition arithmetic, keeping small caste and community parties inside the tent by patient distribution of offices.

Storms, and the airport at Nedumbassery

His last term was marked by both his most durable achievement and his final political injury. In the early 1990s, as chief minister, he pushed the idea of a new international airport for central Kerala, to be financed not by the exchequer alone but by a company holding public and private shareholding. Kochi International Airport Limited was registered in March 1994, land was assembled at Nedumbassery village in Ernakulam district, and the airport that opened there in May 1999 became the first in India built under a public-private partnership. It remains the most visible monument to his time in office and a model later copied across the country. He also survived, with difficulty, a serious road accident in June 1992 that fractured his spine and kept him out of active work for months.

The injury that ended his chief ministership was political. In 1994 the Kerala police registered what became known as the ISRO espionage case, alleging that scientists at the space agency had passed secrets abroad. The investigation collapsed under scrutiny, was found to be without foundation, and years afterwards the scientist at its centre was fully vindicated by the courts. But at the time the affair, and the conduct of the police officers involved, generated a storm within his own party. Karunakaran resigned as Chief Minister in March 1995.

Later years and legacy

He remained in national politics after leaving the state. He served in the Rajya Sabha from April 1995 to February 1998, and was Union Minister for Industry in the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao from 11 June 1995 to 16 May 1996. He returned to the Lok Sabha as the member for Mukundapuram from 1999 to 2004, and sat again in the Rajya Sabha from 2004 to 2005. In 2005, after a bitter falling-out with the party leadership, he broke away to form the Democratic Indira Congress, which merged with the Nationalist Congress Party the following year. He returned to the Congress fold in 2007.

Karunakaran married his cousin Kalyanikutty Amma at Guruvayur in 1954. Their son K. Muraleedharan and daughter Padmaja Venugopal both entered politics in their own right. He died in Thiruvananthapuram on 23 December 2010, aged ninety-two, of cardiac arrest following a stroke; the Prime Minister attended his funeral. Kerala's judgement on him has always been double-edged, admiring of the builder and unforgiving of the Emergency, but no account of the state's modern politics can be written without him. For Chirakkal, the village that produced him, he remains the son who went from a record keeper's household to the chief minister's chair four times over.