FRONT IN KERALA
Bombay
A so-called "Progressive Leftist United Front" has been formed in Kerala to fight the Congress party in the coming elections. Unlike in West Bengal, the members of the front have succeeded in agreeing on the distribution of assembly seats for which they will campaign.
- The front consists of the pro-Peking and pro-Moscow Communist parties, the Samyukta Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India and two reactionary rightist communalist parties. The latter are the Muslim League and the Karshaka Thozhilali Party (a new name given to the erstwhile Anti-Communist Front led by Father Vadakkan, a notorious red-baiting Catholic priest who campaigned for the dismissal of the Communist ministry in Kerala in 1959).
In order to please these new rightist "allies," none of the "Marxist" parties commemorated the October Revolution anywhere in Kerala. In past years these parties engaged in a kind of "socialist competition" in observing the victory of the Russian workers in 1917.
This year two public meetings were held on that day, one at Trivandrum, the other at Ernakulam. These were not organised by any political party but by the Indo-Soviet Cultural Society. Speakers were nonpolitical "Friends of the Soviet Union."
The Trivandrum meeting was presided over by a former president of the Pradesh Congress Committee, now a member of the Public Service Commission.
ANOTHER STEP AHEAD FOR "