Prakash Karat (born 7 February 1948) is an Indian Communist politician. He was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from 2005 to 2015. Education and early career Prakash Karat was born in Letpadan, Burma on 7 February 1948. His father worked as a clerk in the Burma Railways, where he had sought employment during the British Raj. Prakash Karat's family hailed from Elappully, Palakkad, Kerala. Prakash Karat lived in Palakkad till the age of five before returning to Burma where he lived with his family till the age of nine, when his family left Burma for good in 1957. Karat studied in the Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School in Chennai. On finishing school, he won the first prize in an all-India essay competition on the Tokyo Olympics. He was sent on a ten-day visit to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 as a result. He went to the Madras Christian College as an undergraduate student in economics, winning the prize for best all round student on graduation. Encouraged by the Scottish theologian Duncan B. Forrester, one of his college professors, he got a scholarship to Britain's University of Edinburgh, for a master's degree in politics. In 1970 he received an MSc degree from the University of Edinburgh for the thesis "Language and politics in modern India". At Edinburgh he became active in student politics and met Professor Victor Kiernan, the well-known Marxist historian. His political activism began with anti-apartheid protests at the university, for which he was rusticated. The rustication was suspended on good behaviour. Karat returned to India in 1970 and joined Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He worked as an aide to A.K. Gopalan, the legendary communist leader from Kerala and leader of the CPI(M) group in Parliament from 1971 to 1973, while doing his Ph.D. in JNU. Karat was one of the founders of the Students Federation of India (SFI), in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was involved with student politics and was elected the third president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union. He also became the second President of the Students Federation of India between 1974 to 1979. During this period his associates included N. Ram, later editor of The Hindu daily, the radical women's activist Mythili Sivaraman and, less closely, P. Chidambaram, who later became India's finance minister. He worked underground for one and a half years during the Emergency in