Gouri Amma, a rare role model

K R Gouri Amma, the Kerala politician who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 102, was the rare role model for women who aspire for public life and to make a mark in it. But it is wrong to use the standards which are usually used to judge woman politicians in evaluating the contributions she made to social and political life and to administration and government in Kerala. She was a match for the best male politicians and outshone many of them, though it would be rightly felt that she did not get her full due in public life. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which projected her as the chief ministerial candidate in the 1987 state assembly campaign, did not keep its promise after the election and thus missed a historic opportunity to have a woman at the helm of its government.

Gouri Amma was a legislator for 46 years, minister for 16 years and was one of the Communist party’s most popular faces during most part of her life. She had to fight many disadvantages and prejudices from the early part of her life. It was difficult for a woman from a backward caste to acquire education and to choose a professional, much less political, life. She was the first woman lawyer from her community and was attracted to Communism which fired the imagination of many in the state in the 1940s. Her home district, Alappuzha, had also seen some of the uprisings launched by the Communist party. She had to suffer custodial torture and violence during the period. After being elected to the state assembly in 1957, she became the revenue minister and piloted the land reforms bill which dealt a blow to the feudal tenancy laws and land relations in the state. She may be considered the pioneer of land reforms in the country. As a minister in the party's government in 1990, she also facilitated the setting up of the country’s first technology park in Thiruvananthapuram.

Though she was married to a prominent Communist leader, T V Thomas, the marital relations came under strain when she opted for the CPM and her husband remained in the CPI after the party split in 1964. Her relations with the CPM also hit the rocks in 1994 and she was expelled from the party. She formed her own political party and worked with the Congress-led UDF but in later years moved away from the UDF too. Women politicians have to fight and strive much more than men, and even then, the best is not often enough to take them to the top spot. Gouri Amma showed what a woman politician could achieve and what she could not.