Fortunately for Kerala, and world communism, V S Achuthanandan has no beard—nor does Pinarayi Vijayan, his arch party foe and CPM state secretary. They don’t need to worry about the CIA trying to de-beard them, as it famously did with old Fidel in Cuba to make him and his ideology less popular, during the Cold War.

But short of that, the American intelligence demon, comrades here will tell you, is everywhere, and in everything. Trying to take the bottom out of the revolutionary government, doing everything in and out of its dirty tricks book to destroy the Kerala CPM, the CIA’s big international worry.

It uses everything to get things done. The local media, for instance.

A couple of months ago, it was Pinarayi Vijayan who first cried havoc about a “Media Syndicate”. A supposed bourgeois apparition consistently misleading the proletariat with news and investigations the comrades could often do without, and getting party secrets leaked, sometimes before the ink dried on them.

That’s not Pinarayi’s theory. Even VS himself has been quoting a capitalist’s confessions that every comrade worth the sickle and hammer here are now scampering to read. It’s A Dangerous Place, the biography of late US ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In that, Moynihan had talked about how CIA funds went to the Congress to take out Asia’s first Communist Government in Kerala, in 1957.

Moynihan didn’t say that the CIA had bankrolled two of the state’s oldest and highly influential newspapers, Malayala Manorama and Deepika, both slamming the comrades mercilessly at almost every turn. But last week VS, who admitted he had read that book only lately, filled up what Moynihan had left out — he declared both papers were CIA funded in the 1950s.

... contd.