Background
Kumaraswami Kamaraj was born on July 15, 1903 at Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu to Kumaraswamy and Sivakamiv Ammaiar. His father was a merchant. He had a younger sister Nagammal.
Kumaraswami Kamaraj was born on July 15, 1903 at Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu to Kumaraswamy and Sivakamiv Ammaiar. His father was a merchant. He had a younger sister Nagammal.
The boy had only six years of schooling when he dropped out to work in his uncle's cloth shop.
At 17 Kamaraj joined the nationalist movement and soon became the chief lieutenant of Madras Congress leader Sundaresa Satyamurti. His steps up the political ladder include: national Congress Committee in 1931, secretary of the state party in 1935, and member of the Madras Legislative Assembly in 1937 and 1946 and of the Constituent Assembly in 1947. In addition, he was state party president from 1939 to 1954, when he replaced the urbane national leader C. Rajagopalachari, a top-caste Brahmin, as chief minister of Madras.
In 1963 Kamaraj began to devote full time to strengthening the state party. He feared the rise of the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK), a regional group that threatened to lead Madras out of the national union. His resignation to Jawaharlal Nehru stimulated what came to be known as the Kamaraj Plan, which called for officials to resign to devote time to reorganizing the Congress party at the grass-roots level. Kamaraj was made president of the party and his act was interpreted in the selfless sacrifice tradition of Mahatma Gandhi.
When Nehru died in 1964, Kamaraj engineered the selection of Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister. The state-level Congress leaders crucial to the transition were dubbed the "syndicate. " A second term as Congress president followed. After Shastri's death in 1966, Kamaraj arranged the selection of Indira Gandhi as prime minister.
Kamaraj's political influence began to descend in 1967 when he was defeated for a seat in Parliament, and the DMK, now respectable, captured control of the Madras government. An increasingly independent Indira Gandhi continued as prime minister, and a conflict ensued between the government and Kamaraj's group. The party formally split in 1969 with Kamaraj as part of the old guard that tried, unsuccessfully, to remove Gandhi from power. In the same year Kamaraj was elected to Parliament in a by-election and began to rebuild his Madras base.
Although Kamaraj was fluent only in the Tamil language, with English or Hindi being the power tongues of India, his political skills and the timing of crucial events combined to make him a respected national leader. His own low-caste birth helped him to bring others of comparable social order into the Congress fold. Kamaraj devoted himself to the affairs of his home state of Madras until his death there on October 2, 1975.
Though Kamaraj’s role in politics was significant all through, starting off as a political activist and later as the prominent leader of the Indian Independence Movement, his most important contribution came later in his career as the Chief Minister of Madras State. Under his governance, Madras became one of the best administered states of the country. He emphasized on educational reforms, introducing free compulsory education. He established new schools and introduced the concept of midday meal scheme under which lakhs of poor and deprived children were provided food. He also tried to get rid of caste and creed differences. Irrigation and industry also prospered and grew under his three-consecutive term governance.
He was awarded with India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, posthumously in 1976. He is widely acknowledged as "Kalvi Thanthai" (Father of Education) in Tamil Nadu. The domestic terminal of the Chennai airport is named "Kamaraj Terminal". Chennai's beach road is named "Kamarajar Salai", Bangalore's North Parade Road and Parliament road in New Delhi as "K. Kamaraj Road" and the Madurai Kamaraj University in his honour.
