India's first elected Communist government is dismissed

E. M. S. Namboodiripad became Kerala's Chief Minister on 5 April 1957, leading the first Communist party government to come to power through an election anywhere in the world. His government pushed land reforms that curtailed large landholdings and an education bill that tightened state oversight of church-run schools — measures that drew fierce opposition from an alliance of the Congress, the Muslim League, and Christian and landowning groups.

That opposition organised into the Vimochana Samaram, or “Liberation Struggle,” a mass agitation through 1958–59 that included strikes, protests and clashes with police, and which its supporters cast as a popular uprising against Communist overreach while the government and its allies called it an orchestrated campaign to unseat an elected ministry.

On 31 July 1959, the central government invoked Article 356 of the Constitution — on the Union Cabinet's advice — to dismiss Namboodiripad's ministry and dissolve the Assembly, after 27 months in office. It was the first time a state government had been dismissed this way since the Constitution's adoption, and it set a precedent for central intervention in state governments that would recur many times over the following decades.