CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury. File.
| Photo Credit: PTI
CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury, 72, passed away at All India Institute of Medical Sciences on Thursday (September 12, 2024) after prolonged illness. He had been undergoing treatment for lung infection and was admitted to the hospital on August 19th
Mr. Yechury straddled many identities. He was a Marxist, he was a polyglot who was at ease in high brow academic circles but could very well explain the same theories in 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 yet you could not tie him down to any one label.
Born on 12th August 1952 into a Telugu speaking family in Chennai. His father was an engineer in Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation and his mother was a government servant. He grew up in Hyderabad till the Telangana agitation of 1969 brought him to Delhi. A gold medalist in economics Mr. Yechury graduated from St. Stephen’s college in Delhi university. He chose the newly established Jawaharlal Nehru University over Delhi School of Economics for his masters. 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 JNU students union President for forcing Indira Gandhi to resign as the chancellor. 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 faculty together ensured the University continues to function as usual. The library was open 24-hours, all classes were held and mess was running. This went on for about forty days. “There was a shortage of money. I remember, we sent out students to Sarojini Nagar market and Connaught place with placards around their necks which read, “University is functioning, the VC is on strike” to collect money to run the University,” he recalled in the same interview.
Indira Gandhi even after defeat in Lok Sabha elections had been holding on to her post as Chancellor of the university. 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 surrounded by students.
He along with his predecessor Prakash Karat were instrumental in making JNU an impregnable Left bastion.
During his nearly five decade long political career, he broke several conventions. First of which was to become the national President of Students Federation of India. All the Presidents till then had come from Kerala or Bengal, he was the first not to belong to either of the states.
He had never headed a district or state unit of the party. Yet, he became a member of the central committee at 32 and politburo 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 was a member of Rajya Sabha from 2005 to 2017. The party declined to give him a third term quoting the internal cap set by the party. He was an astute Parliamentarian, who 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 UPA governments in 2004 & 2009. And he was also a key agent in bringing the opposition parties closed ahead of 2019 general elections and formation of INDIA bloc 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 electoral understanding with the Congress in West Bengal. Here again he was breaking another significant convention. CPI(M) was stridently anti- Congress and while the CPI extended support to the party during Emergency, 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. Which in other words meant electoral understanding with parties like Congress. The line that was adamantly opposed by the Kerala faction and it was only grudgingly accepted after Mr. Yechury convincingly made his point on 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