VS Achuthanandan (1923-2025): The reluctant iconoclast of Indian communism

VS Achuthanandan, former Kerala Chief Minister and the last surviving member of the 32 comrades who defiantly walked out of the CPI national council in 1964 to form the CPM, leaves behind a legacy forged in the fire of pre-Independence peasant movements in Travancore. He was hardened in the street battles of a party repeatedly banned in postcolonial India and further steeled by the internecine wranglings of Stalinist politics within the CPM.

Born in 1923 in Alappuzha district, Achuthanandan, popularly known as VS, was handpicked by P Krishna Pillai, one of the pioneering communist leaders of what is now Kerala. Over the decades, he worked closely with the party’s founding figures, including AK Gopalan, EMS Namboodiripad and others. He would go on to serve as both Chief Minister and Leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Assembly.

As state party secretary from 1980 to 1992, VS oversaw the CPM’s growth as an organisational force and helped it secure a resounding electoral comeback after years of political stagnation.

Abrasive, uncompromising and often ruthless, VS was never widely liked, either within the party or beyond. Yet his political career, which spanned more than 85 of his 100-plus years, was marked by fierce discipline and an unshakable commitment to the party line. He tolerated no dissent, offered no quarter to opponents, and was notoriously difficult to work with for those who didn’t agree fully with him. His sense of humour was dry and often dark.

VS was a lifelong factionalist, rebelling even as he led. He offered crucial leadership during times of party crisis but was also at the heart of many of its internal battles.

Late in life, he was unexpectedly elevated to a near-messianic status after clashing with the party leadership, particularly current Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, his one-time ally and rival more than two decades his junior. Once written off as a spent force, VS re-emerged as a “corrective” figure in the CPM, his appeal growing among Left-leaning voters disenchanted with the party’s compromises.

VS’s new avatar as a moral reformer attracted admiration even from former detractors. Dogmatic and uncharismatic for most of his career, he was now viewed as a principled outlier within a party seen to be veering away from its ideological roots. His popularity surged across party lines.

He was especially embraced by disaffected Leftists, civil society actors, and even opposition parties who saw in him a hope that the CPM could be restored to its former progressive self. The media, traditionally hostile to the Marxists, found in VS a ready-made saviour, one they helped mythologise with enthusiasm.

To his credit, he defied the party despite repeated threats of disciplinary action from both the state and central leadership. But he knew the limits of confrontation. While he lambasted Vijayan’s leadership, he carefully avoided attacking the central politburo directly. He understood that the CPM was no longer the rigid, punitive machine of the Soviet era. Defying the party no longer carried the same peril.

His reinvention as a people’s activist was carefully managed. Advised by a loyal group of aides, VS took up causes such as environmental protection, women’s rights, and anti-encroachment campaigns. This allowed him to remain politically relevant well into his 90s. When he became Chief Minister in 2006, he was already past 80, but he often acted more like an Opposition leader, publicly questioning party decisions that his own government was bound to implement.

VS also washed the CPM’s dirty laundry in public, damaging the reputation of several leaders through a clique of journalists and intellectuals who had aligned with him. This informal grouping, sometimes derided by rivals as the “media syndicate”, used every opportunity to glorify VS by casting others in a negative light. The more tarnished his internal opponents appeared, the more VS’s stature seemed to grow.

Pinarayi Vijayan, despite his commanding hold over the party, could do little to counter the sustained media campaign against him. His attempts to discredit the pro-VS narrative often backfired. In Kerala’s media, criticism of VS had become almost taboo, while he remained free to attack whomever he pleased.

Ironically, the very man once known for purges and ideological policing within the party had come to be seen as its conscience-keeper, a crusader against corruption, corporate collusion, and moral decay.

Some commentators, particularly among Kerala’s Muslim community, viewed VS as anti-Muslim. This perception, however, was more a result of his attacks on the nexus between certain wealthy businessmen—often from Muslim families based in the Gulf—and his rivals within the party. His opposition was more or less class-based and factional, not communal.

In the end, even as his faction shrank and lost formal power, VS continued to shape the narrative in ways the opposition, Congress or BJP, could never manage. He inflicted deep reputational wounds on CPM leaders, in the name of ideological purification, that may never fully heal.

At his death on July 21, even his longtime opponents paid tribute, calling him a “fighter among fighters,” a “true communist,” and placing him in the same pantheon as Krishna Pillai and AK Gopalan. It was a final act of poetic justice: in death, he was accorded the honour so long denied in life.

From school dropout and tailor to people’s leader, VS embodied the stubborn resilience of a generation that rose through sheer force of will. He was defeated in 1996 even as his party swept the polls. In 2015, he was humiliated at a state conference by his own loyalists. Yet he endured as an inconvenient comrade who refused to fall in line. His staying power had less to do with shifting political tides and more with an elemental and personal resolve. Some people are simply too relentless to be sidelined and granting them some space becomes the only way even their fiercest critics find peace.

AK GopalanCPMdeathEMS NamboodiripadKerala Chief MinisterobituaryVS Achuthanandan