The Discreet Charm of an Indian Marxist

SITARAM YECHURY, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), who died in Delhi on September 12 after a respiratory illness, had earned a reputation as one of the most affable and versatile among India’s leftist politicians.

He was suave and savvy, unflappable in TV and parliamen­tary debates, and had an inimitable style of putting across his arguments without appearing hostile and quarrelsome. And yet, he was firm, especially when it came to what he considered was akin to the idea conceived by Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930s called the ‘popular front’, an anti-fascist coalition he envisaged would go beyond working-class groups and draw centrists and social democrats into its fold.

For Yechury, it meant establishing close political and personal links with Congress and other regional parties to try to isolate the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Under his watch, his party, once known for anti-Congressism, experimented with alliances with the Grand Old Party in some regions. Though some within the party had reservations, it was Yechury’s way to salvage the situation.

Yechury, who died aged 72, took over as CPM chief in 2015— at a time when the biggest constituent of the Indian Left had rapidly shrunk following its decimation in West Bengal where it had ruled for 34 straight years from 1977, and when the rules of engagement in national politics had changed forever.

No other previous general secretary of his party had to stare at bleak electoral prospects the way Yechury had to. Under founder chief P Sundarayya (who was at the helm from 1964 to 1976), the party had scaled new highs organisationally, notwithstanding occasional poll setbacks and the fallow period of Emergency. His successor EMS Namboodiripad (1977-1992), too, had reigned over gains, especially in the three states of West Bengal, Tripura, and Kerala. Harkishan Singh Surjeet (1992-2005) perfected the art of cobbling alliances although his best-kept plans—such as anointing the late party veteran and then West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu as prime minister in 1996 and joining the Congress-led government in 2004—were spoiled by younger comrades whom he trashed in anger as “Naxalites”.

Prakash Karat, Yechury’s predecessor, took over the reins in 2005 from Surjeet when the CPM was at the peak of its electoral glory, with 43 seats in Lok Sabha. By the time Yechury became party chief, its Lok Sabha numbers had fallen to nine. Over the years, the Left’s parliamentary strength dwindled further as it got trounced in Tripura, and with Kerala electing a sole member, this time, to Lok Sabha. Of its four current Lok Sabha MPs, two are from Tamil Nadu where CPM contested as a part of the DMK-led coalition, and one from Rajasthan where the Left party was aligned with Congress.

Despite being reduced to the margins of mainstream politics, Yechury as party chief retained, quite unlike any other leftist leader of his generation or in the past, the halo he had acquired thanks to his geniality and interper­sonal skills. He was considered a sane voice, and within any congregation of anti-BJP parties, he had a larger-than-life presence, dispropor­tionate to the electoral heft of his party.

A politician who made it to the higher echelons of his party from student politics, Yechury was born in a Telugu Brahmin family in Chennai. His father was an engineer with the state transport corporation and held a transferable job. The family shifted to Delhi when his father was hired to set up a Central health transport corporation modelled on one in Andhra Pradesh. As a result, Yechury attended the President’s Estate School before he chose to study economics against the wishes of his fam­ily and joined St Stephen’s. He went on to study briefly at the Delhi School of Economics and then shifted to Jawaharlal Nehru Uni­versity (JNU). It was there that he had his first brush with politics. During the Emergency, Yechury was arrested and sent to jail.

Within his party, Yechury, a polyglot, was destined to break many glass ceilings. As with student leaders of CPM, the top two positions of secretary and president invariably had gone to repre­sentatives from West Bengal and Kerala, respectively. But he was an outlier. In 1979, he became a joint secretary of the CPM’s stu­dent organisation, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), and its president in 1984. The same year, he was named a special invitee to the Central Committee, in 1992, to the Central Secretariat and, subsequently, to the Politburo. Yechury was by then considered an intellectual of standing. He would accompany the late Namboodiripad on all his foreign trips to former socialist countries.

Yechury also endeared himself to his comrades thanks to his humility, and his insightful articles and booklets targeting Hindutva politics, which was fast gaining in momentum in the 1990s. Interestingly, in the Chennai Party Congress of CPM in 1992, it was Yechury who was chosen to prepare explanatory notes about the global situation. He was just 40 years old back then and some of the tall leaders of his party, who were seen as astute in ideological matters, were still alive. The Soviet Union had crumbled and there was widespread despair among communists worldwide. Yet, it was Yechury who presented the paper titled ‘On certain Ideological Issues’ before the party conclave.

However, when political opportunities came knocking, like other young party leaders in his party, he too agreed to let go of them, firstin1996, andthenin2004. He and the others seemed to assume that Indian politics would throw up greater opportunities later. Instead, with the old guard gone, CPM ended up declining thanks to a variety of reasons, including factional feuds, absolutism, and arrogance, along with the growing appeal of Hindutva politics and the dismal failure of its leaders at all levels to connect with the masses. Massive reversal of political fortunes—espe­cially the end of the commanding dominance that the CPM enjoyed in West Bengal—made attempts at correction rather futile.

In hindsight, Yechury deserves praise for his guts and determination in 2015 to campaign democratically within his party for the top post against the might of CPM’s influential Kerala unit, which had backed a Malayali, S Ramachandran Pillai. In the end, Yechury had the last laugh, and I recall a senior CPM leader from Kerala telling me, “It makes sense that he won. He is best suited for the post, especially in these troubled times.”

Yechury, who had collaborated with Congress leader P Chidambaram in drafting a common minimum programme for the running of the United Front government in 1996 — and later played a pivotal role in 2004 in steering the Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh, which had the outside support of the CPM — wasn’t pleased with the way his party handled its quibbles with Congress and its decision to pull out in 2008. He had shared with people close to him the alternatives he had been exploring. From 2005 to 2015, he felt slighted at not being kept in the loop on crucial mat­ters by the leadership. Even so, the chain-smoking communist remained one of the most favourite leaders among the cadres, who looked up to him for his views on organisational matters and issues of transparency within. His oratorical skills and ripostes in debates, too, helped him steal the limelight, occasionally.

In the end, he was an intellectual and a politician whose party couldn’t perhaps tap his potential to the fullest.

CPM chiefdeathEMS NamboodiripadIn MemoriamIndian MarxistobituaryS Ramachandran PillaiSitaram Yechury