KOLLAM: He neither made an appeal to the people to vote for him nor spoke of his symbol. He didn’t meet voters or engage in door-to-door canvassing.
And he won the election by a huge margin! “This is what happened in North Bombay Lok Sabha constituency in 1957 when V K Krishna Menon won the elections hands down,” recollects R S Pillai, a retired officer of the Central Food Department who witnessed Menon’s campaign in those days.
Pillai, 73, is leading a retired life at his native place here after spending about five decades in the north. An avid reader, Pillai still has a passion for journalism. He published articles in leading English dailies and wrote a weekly column for an English daily published from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra as its Kerala correspondent after retirement.
Three years ago Pillai published his debut novel Crows Lose Their Souls, a story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
He went to Bombay at a young age when the commercial capital of the country was an undivided state. The movement for a separate Maharashtra state was gaining momentum in spite of the brutal attempts to suppress it by the then Bombay state government headed by Morarji Desai who was a leader of the right wing in the Congress party. Most of the Malayalis settled in Bombay were sympathetic to the movement. It was at this time that Krishna Menon was fielded as the Congress candidate in North Bombay constituency for the elections to the second Lok Sabha.
Menon, known as ‘Nehru`s Man’ was considered a communist though he nurtured an antipathy for the communist party for obvious reasons.
Right wing leaders in the Congress were annoyed with Menon’s candidature and leaders such as S K Patil publicly came out against him. Malayalis in Bombay, irrespective of their political leanings, became enthused over the candidature of Menon and worked actively for him.
Menon, usually seen in his white dhoti and kurta and a walking stick, was at the peak of his popularity in India and abroad. He played leading roles in the mission to end the Korean War and in the Bandung conference in 1955 which paved the way for the formation of the Non- Aligned Movement. Not to mention his historic marathon speech at the UN General Assembly on the Kashmir issue.
“At election meetings Menon spoke in detail about the issues of war and peace, Kashmir and other national and international issues only. He never mentioned the party or his symbol. All the election work was done by the Congress workers there,’’ says Pillai. The press was hostile to Menon except for Blitz, edited by R K Karanjia, a sympathiser with Nehru and the Left.
Campaigns undertaken by doyens of the Bombay film world Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand for Menon turned into mega events.
They enthralled people with their comedy. Dev Anand’s superhit ‘Prem Pujari’ had just released then. .
Menon won in the same constituency in 1962. Though he became the Defence Minister, the right wing forces in the Congress forced him to resign following the Chinese aggression.
In 1967, he contested from North Bombay again but lost. The Shiv Sena made its presence felt by launching its ‘sons of the soil’ movement, directed especially against those from Kerala and Madras. In the 1967 elections, the Congress suffered setbacks all over the country.
In 1971, Menon was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency as an independent.