Criticism
While being hailed as a modernizing reformer by many, C. P. is also criticized as a capitalist, authoritarian, imperialist and anti-Communist by some. C. P. has been sharply criticized for failing to rescue the deteriorating Travancore National and Quilon Bank and for cracking down on the bank and its Managing Director, C. P. Mathen.It is believed that C.P framed the downfall of Quilon Bank, using his influence. In 1946, Communist dissent over C. P.'s policies erupted in the form of the Punnapra-Vayalar revolt which was crushed with a brutal hand by Travancore army and navy. Communist hatred over C. P.'s policies finally culminated in an assassination attempt upon the Diwan. However, despite deep antagonism between C. P. and Communists, he opposed the dismissal of the Communist government of Kerala headed by E. M. S. Namboodiripad in 1959 by the Jawaharlal Nehru government as "unconstitutional".
C. P. was also labelled as a "secessionist" due to his initial reluctance in merging Travancore with the Indian Union. Jawaharlal Nehru said of his attitude towards imperialism:
There is little now in common between us except our common nationality. He is today a full-blooded apologist of British rule in India, especially during the last few years; an admirer of dictatorship in India and elsewhere, and himself a shining ornament of autocracy in an Indian state.
His attempt to negotiate a trade agreement with Pakistan on behalf of Travancore was viewed as a betrayal by most Indians. The Temple Entry Proclamation was regarded by missionaries as an attempt to check Christian conversions in the kingdom.
Read more about this topic: C. P. Ramaswami Iyer
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)