Almost 50 years after the world saw the first democratically elected Communist government assume power in a small state in India, more evidence has surfaced to prove that it was toppled by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Kerala’s EMS Namboodiripad Government was dismissed by the Nehru Cabinet on July 31, 1959, citing chaotic law and order situation as the reason.
Till recently, the only evidence of the CIA’s role in the operation remained the admissions of former US ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1978 book A Dangerous Place. However, State Finance Minister and Marxist ideologue T M Thomas Isaac has prised out more information about the CIA operations during his recent visit to the United States.
The most important of his findings were the information available in an oral history interview by Ellsworth Bunker, who was US Ambassador to India from 1957 to 1961. The interview has also appeared in his biography Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk by Howard B Schaffer.
 In his book, Mr Bunker expresses no regret about his involvement or the operation funded by Washington. He says that the CIA provided financial assistance for the Congress because the embassy had hard evidence that the Soviets were funding the local communists “as they have done everywhere in the world. But as we have done elsewhere in the world we have come to the assistance of our friends when we knew and had evidence (of) what the Communists were doing financially and otherwise’’. 
Bunker said he had the discretion on how the operation might be done and “in what amounts”.
 Says Finance Minister Thomas Isaac: “He names S K Patil, the then agriculture Minister in the Nehru cabinet, as the man who distributed the funds. The food assistance then extended by the US under P L 480 has much to do with raising Patil’s status.’’
Interestingly, Bunker has given a  clean chit to Indira Gandhi whom Moynihan had accused of having received funds. Dr Isaac also refers to the book Estranged Democracies by retired US State Department South Asia specialist Dennis Kux as also several declassified documents of the US State Department to buttress his theory.
Kux’s book says  the 1957 election results “rang alarm bells in Washington where preventing additional Keralas became an important argument for augmenting US assistance to India”. 
This (the strategy) apparently involved agency funding for political demonstrations organised by the Congress party and other opposition groups that were designed to create a law and order situation...’’
It may be noted that the law and order “situation” that ultimately proved to be the nemesis of the EMS Government was mainly created by the Liberation Struggle launched by the Church and supported by the Opposition parties led by the Congress.