CHILE AND THE PARLIAMENTARY ROAD 5 ment in terms of the Constitution. It is, however, similar in one respect: just as in Chile, so in Kerala too, there was an executive administration elected by the people and pursuing policies which were not to the liking of the reactionary vested interests. Unlike in Chile, the authority of the left and democratic government here. was confined to one particular state in the whole country. That administration, therefore, had extremely limited powers; the essence of state power, that is, direct control over the military, and real though less direct control over the police, jails, courts and so on rested with the Centre. There was therefore no necessity for organizing a military coup against the Kerala government. The exercise of the constitutional power which, under the terms of the Constitution, rested in the Central Government, was enough to serve the same purpose, as was served in Chile through the military coup. Even then, it is significant that Indira Gandhi as the then President of the Congress organized the notorious 'liberation struggle,' denounced even by the bourgeois liberal constitutionalists as an unconstitutional direct action, resorted to by the party ruling at the Centre against the government of a state where the people had rejected it. It was behind the facade of such an unconstitutional direct action, hailed by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, as a big 'mass upsurge5 that the 'constitutional authority' vested in the Central Government was exercised to overthrow the state government. Such a combination of unconstitutional action organized by the ruling party from below and the apparently 'constitutional action' taken by the Central Government from the top, was enough for the ruling party under the specific conditions of India,prevailing at that time. It was however clear from what was done by Indira Gandhi as Congress President and by the Central Government controlled by her party that, in case what happened in Kerala in 1957-59 repeats itself at any time on an all-India scale, the ruling party headed by Indira Gandhi now (and she herself personally) would not hesitate to do what the Chilean counter-revolutionaries, assisted by their friends and patrons abroad, did to the Allende regime. This conclusion was further confirmed a decade later during 1967-69. The Congress Party was once again defeated in a general election, and defeated much more extensively than in 1957. It was not one state but eight that were now lost to the Congress. Unlike in Kerala a decade ago, however, the governments that replaced the Congress in all these states were heterogeneous in political composition. The ruling party, therefore, could play upon the political and partisan conflicts among the various constituents of the coalition governments in every one of these states in order to topple them. Ther& was no need to organize a 'liberation struggle' of the type whipped up in Kerala a decade ago, or for the Centre to intervene. These governments were one by one toppled through intrigues of various types, including