V. Viswanatha Menon

Vadakkoot Viswanatha Menon, known among friends as Ambadi Viswam, was a firebrand political activist in his youth, one of the accused in the Communist attack on the Edappally police station. He was a leader of Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala. Starting his career as a student activist and leader for the freedom fight in his alma mater Maharaja's College, he became popularly known as "Ambady Viswam" among his peers, colleagues, seniors, and near ones as his father belongs to the famous Nair family of Cochin "Ambady", and was one of the popular youths in Kochi at that time, due to his frank and fearless opinion and actions against any injustice and oppression. A follower of Gandhi from childhood, he was inclined towards communism and socialism during his student days, due to the influence of many prominent personalities around him, one of them being his cousin A.K. Damodaran (ex-I.A.S).

V. Viswanatha Menon was one of the earliest members of CPI in and around Kochi and played an essential role in erecting its base amidst the Monarchic & Imperialistic Period of the 1940s and early 1950s, and later on spreading Democratic ethos and Credentials here along with other stalwarts and consequently imbibing and adopting Democratic Principles and working as per the same in several roles later on his political career. He worked among the party ranks for growth and against the suppression of the oppressed, after sacrificing his royal and rather comfortable and convenient life in his highly affluent feudal family.

The various malafides and atrocities committed in those feudal times upon the less fortunate and less affluent downtown people contemptously and disdainfully looked upon and termed "lowly castes", subjugating them to literal slavery offering their great services in the above, in return for penury and deprivation greatly disturbed and angered an enlightened Ambady Viswam, who had a soft-spot for the downtrodden from his childhood days, and inspired him to take a giant step in the world of Socialism and later on Democracy, as a means of removing these ills from Society for an Egalitarian and Justice based future.

A two-Time Member of Parliament representing CPI & later the CPI (M) faction that came into being after the 1964 split in the Communist Bastion, he was also the Finance Minister in the 1987 E.K. Nayanar led Left Democratic Front Government.

A FACT union president for 12 years, and Indal union president for 14 years, Ambadi Viswam was also the leader of a Cochin Port union.


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