CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury passed away at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences here on Thursday. He had been undergoing treatment for a lung infection and was admitted to the hospital on August 19.
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Mr. Yechury, 72, straddled many identities. He was a Marxist, a polyglot who was at ease in high-brow academic circles but could very well explain the same theories in the plainest of language to the person on the street, he spoke multiple tongues, he was a strategist who revelled in bringing disparate ideological strands together. He was many things and he could not be tied down to any one label.
He was born on August 12, 1952 into a Telugu-speaking family in Chennai. His father was an engineer in the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation and his mother a government servant. He grew up in Hyderabad till the Telangana agitation of 1969 brought him to Delhi. A gold medallist in economics, Mr. Yechury graduated from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He chose the newly established Jawaharlal Nehru University over the Delhi School of Economics for his Master’s — a choice that steered his career in an entirely different direction. He was drawn to the irreverent academic atmosphere of the new university where the faculty addressed the students by their first names and expected the students to address them by theirs. In an interview to The Hindu in 2020, he recalled, “In my entrance interview, there were three very senior professors. Suddenly one of them asked, ‘Do you smoke?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘Then light one up.’”
It was here that his political career began. He made a name for himself as the JNU Students Union President for forcing Indira Gandhi to resign as the Chancellor of the university. The students refused to allow the then Vice-Chancellor, B.D. Nag Chaudhary, to enter the campus. The government, in response, issued orders to close the university. But the students and the faculty together ensured that the university continued to function as usual. The library was open 24 hours, all classes were held and the mess was running. This went on for some 40 days. “There was a shortage of money. I remember, we sent out students to the Sarojini Nagar market and Connaught Place with placards around their necks which read, ‘University is functioning, the V-C is on strike’, to collect money to run the university,” he recalled in the interview.
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Indira Gandhi, even after her defeat in the Lok Sabha election, had been holding on to her post as Chancellor. The students led by him marched to her house demanding her resignation. “There were 500 of us. Her aide told us that only five of us can go in to meet her. But when we insisted, she herself came out. We read out our resolution against her which was full of litanies, but she heard stoically. I handed over the resolution to her and she took it politely too. Couple of days later, she resigned,” he said. This incident was recorded in the famous photograph of Indira Gandhi standing stoically next to a dishevelled Yechury holding a resolution in his hand and surrounded by students.
He, along with his predecessor Prakash Karat, was instrumental in making the JNU an impregnable Left bastion.
During his nearly five-decade political career, he broke several conventions, first of which was to become the president of the Students’ Federation of India. All the presidents till then had come from Kerala or Bengal; he did not belong to either.
He had never headed a district or State unit of the party. Yet, he became a member of the Central Committee at 32 and of the Polit Bureau at 40. A three-time general secretary of the party, he was elected for the first time in 2015. His accession to the seat came at the lowest ebb of the party.
He had been a member of the Rajya Sabha from 2005 to 2017. The party declined to give him a third term, citing the internal cap set by it. He was an astute parliamentarian, whose sharp political speeches were punctuated with humour and wit. Often he regaled the members with lessons in history to make a point about the present.
Mr. Yechury, an ardent advocate of coalition politics, took on the role played by his mentor and former CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Surjeet. He worked on the Common Minimum Programme for the United Front government in 1996 and for the United Progressive Alliance governments in 2004 and 2009. And he was also a key agent in bringing the Opposition parties close, ahead of the Lok Sabha election in 2019 and formation of the Indian National Developmental, Inclusive Alliance in 2023. He deployed his charisma to iron out differences and settle the ego clashes between the bigwigs of different parties. The one-time student leader who confronted Indira Gandhi was close to her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi and grandson Rahul Gandhi.
As the general secretary of the party, Mr. Yechury brought in the same coalition spirit to steer the party into striking an electoral understanding with the Congress in West Bengal. Here again, he was breaking another significant convention. The CPI(M) was stridently anti-Congress, and while the CPI extended support to India’s grand old party during the Emergency, the CPI(M) remained its strongest critic.
Ahead of the Party Congress in 2018, Mr. Yechury in October 2017, invoking Leon Trotsky’s words “March separately but strike together”, underlined the necessity of pooling of all anti-BJP votes. In other words, it meant an electoral understanding with parties such as the Congress. The line was adamantly opposed by the Kerala faction and it was only grudgingly accepted after Mr. Yechury convincingly made his point on the BJP’s ascendancy.
He often employed the Leninist dictum that the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living essence of dialectics” to explain the Left’s electoral decline, arguing that the party may have failed to adapt swiftly to the changing political situation.
Published - September 12, 2024 04:20 pm IST
