A long political love story

K.P. NAYAR ,The Telegraph Calcutta
Washington, Sept. 5: Theirs was an eight-year romance that led to a sensational marriage, the contradictions of which posed a huge dilemma in the 1960s for boys and girls in Kerala, like this writer, who were at a very impressionable age.

It was impossible for many starry-eyed idealists in schools and colleges to identify with the politics of Vayalar Ravi and Mercy who died today in Chennai after a prolonged illness. She was 63.

Their politics then relied on the strength of the Christian church and the powerful Nair Service Society to oust Kerala’s first communist government and then checkmate legendary Marxist leaders like E.M.S Namboodiripad and A.K. Gopalan who were deified in the state almost like North Korea’s “great leader”.

At the same time, in their personal lives, Ravi, a Hindu of the “backward” Ezhava caste and Mercy, a Christian, were challenging deep-rooted prejudices and obscurantism of the kind that prompted Swami Vivekananda to exclaim in 1892 on a visit to what is now Kerala that “I have wandered into a lunatic asylum”.

Of course, Ravi came from a family, in which, both his parents were freedom fighters and committed Congress workers.

Theirs was love at first sight on the very first day that Mercy enrolled at one of the few co-ed colleges in Kerala, the Maharaja’s College in Ernakulam. In the Kerala of the 1960s, though, love at first sight meant just that: there was little more to love than mere sight.

Mercy, who belonged to a very prominent, but conservative Christian family in Ernakulam, used to marvel in later life that Ravi showed the same daring in their budding romance that he showed as a student leader in taking on the communists.

After watching her from a distance for many months, Ravi -- who had already acquired state-wide recognition as a founder of the Congress Party’s student wing, the Kerala Students’ Union -- broke taboos in college and got some girl students on campus to get himself introduced to Mercy.

Kerala was in utter turmoil during those years. In the college that this writer went to in Thiruvananthapuram, just half a dozen students could make sure that classes were suspended for an entire day and violence was rampant. A favourite target of students was the American Cultural Center in the state capital.

Mercy used to say that Ravi won her heart by ensuring that every time there was a strike or violence in college, which meant several times a month, he sent one of his sidekicks -- who were in plenty -- to escort her safely home.

In later life, long after Ravi had become a national-level Congress leader, parliamentarian and Union minister, he would still be as protective about his wife. She was drawn to Congress politics as a student and later into public life because of her husband.

Once, Mercy ran out of legislative funds for a development project in her constituency when she was a member of the Kerala legislature. Ravi helped complete the project by transferring money from his MP’s development fund, which he could do as a Rajya Sabha member.

As a couple, they always thought big. Mercy’s debut in Kerala’s electoral politics was from Mala, a constituency vacated in 1996 after 30 years by the tallest Congress leader in the state, former chief minister K. Karunakaran.

Outsiders think of Kerala as a pioneering Indian state on social issues like literacy and equality for women. But even at the turn of this millennium, Mercy proved that she could do another “first” as a woman in Kerala.

Eight years ago, she became the first woman to win election to the Assembly from the conservative Christian stronghold of Kottayam.

It is ironic that 36 years after Ravi and Mercy fell in love with each other, married and had three children, their inter-religious alliance should have become controversial in Kerala’s famous Guruvayur temple.

After Ravi’s son, Ravi Krishna and his bride went to Guruvayur to seek the deity’s blessings for their Hindu marriage, temple authorities performed a ritual purifying the temple premises because Ravi Krishna’s mother, Mercy, was a Christian. The committee regretted it after Ravi kicked up a fuss.

The lasting memory of Kerala’s longest political love story will be a huge photograph that prominently hangs on a wall in Ravi’s ministerial bungalow in New Delhi. It shows Ravi affectionately leaning over Mercy’s hospital bed in her last days and kissing her on her cheek, something the couple could not have dreamt of doing in the days when they were secretly in love in Maharaja’s College.