Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary and former Rajya Sabha member Sitaram Yechury passed away in a Delhi hospital on September 12 after battling a severe respiratory infection. He was 72. People from across the political spectrum mourned his passing, recalling his commitment to the working class, the Constitution, and social justice and equality.
Sitaram, or just “Sita” to his friends, cut his teeth in politics early, as a student in Jawaharlal Nehru University, a Left bastion in the 1970s. He was elected president of the JNU Students Union three times between 1977 and 1978, a period he would later describe with characteristic wit and humour as his term was punctuated by interruptions, coinciding with post-Emergency struggles. He was also arrested for a brief while during that period. Later, in the 1980s, he was elected all-India president of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI).
Yechury will be remembered and celebrated for his role as a Member of Parliament and for bringing together diverse political forces in the battle against communalism and authoritarianism, which are among the many facets of his journey as a pragmatic communist.
The political upsurges during his JNU years, which eventually evolved into the struggle against the Emergency, coupled with his study of economics with the late Krishna Bharadwaj and others at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, provided the milieu in which his political perspective developed.
He began a doctorate on Indian agriculture, which he never completed, but a paper based on the early stages of his research appeared in Economic & Political Weekly in 1976.
Early years
A brilliant student, he was born in Chennai (then Madras) into a family that came from Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh. He was raised and did his schooling in Hyderabad. As a result, he was conversant in both Hindi and English.
He landed in Delhi for higher studies and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from St. Stephen’s College. Yechury had a stellar academic record, having stood first in the all-India examination of the Central Board of Secondary Education.
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He also played tennis, loved old Hindi film songs, the tunes of which he often whistled, and he was completely colour blind. One of his favourite songs was the Hemant Kumar number “Ae mere pyare watan” from the film Kabuliwala.
He was a junior of fellow ideologue and party member Prakash Karat, and both were early mentors to subsequent generations of student leaders who lived by the motto of “study and struggle” and “education for all”, which was the SFI creed.
Yechury perhaps figured out early on that the most complex ideas could be communicated in the language of the people. He was not one for using complex theories, at least in the public domain, and he knew that the Left movement and Left politics could become popular only by raising people’s issues through class struggles and by demystifying jargon.
His affability was well known, something friends and associates recall fondly. Yechury was popular, but he was not a demagogue; nor did he use bombastic language. His speeches were conversational in style, presenting arguments conveyed in a language that everyone could understand.
CPI(M)‘s ‘rising star’
His political journey from student leader to joining the ranks of the CPI(M) in the mid-1970s often led to descriptions of him as a “rising star” of the party. In the 1980s, he was the editor of the SFI journal, Students’ Struggle, which reached new heights during his tenure. Yechury even enlisted the support of Safdar Hashmi, the renowned playwright and director, in this venture.
It was during this time that the then government’s “Challenge of Education” document appeared, marking the beginnings of a shift in the country’s education policy towards what was then known as the “New Education Policy”, which eventually became the National Policy on Education 1986. Yechury was a leading figure in developing a critique of that policy and organising resistance to it.
“In Parliament, Sitaram Yechury’s speeches often referred to “India, that is Bharat”, to exemplify the country’s syncretic tradition. This emphasis only grew after the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance assumed power in 2014.”
In 1985, 10 years after Yechury joined the CPI(M), he was elected to the Central Committee of the party. The following years were tumultuous ones for any communist: the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, the Tiananmen Square incident, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the eventual collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe.
The Left, globally and internally, was under severe attack. In the ideological challenges and debates that sprung up from these events, Yechury stayed firm: mistakes may have been made but socialism was the future. He always analysed these developments within a Marxist framework and actively participated in shaping the CPI(M)’s positions on these questions.
In Parliament, Yechury’s speeches often referred to “India, that is Bharat”, to exemplify the country’s syncretic tradition. This emphasis only grew after the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance assumed power in 2014 and attacks on minorities became commonplace. He defended his alma mater (JNU) in Parliament when it was unfairly targeted by the regime. He was equally emphatic about the attack on institutions, the subversion of the Constitution, the safeguarding of the rights of Dalits and minorities, and the need to safeguard the autonomy of higher educational institutions. At the same time, he also realised that while both the Congress and the BJP were bourgeois parties, the threat from the latter was greater. There was a growing feeling that the changed conditions perhaps necessitated the forging of tactical alliances without compromising on the fundamentals of ideology.
No disconnect between personality and politics
Despite its greatly reduced influence in Parliament post-2014, the Left parties led by the CPI(M) still commanded considerable moral heft. Forging a secular third front was not enough. There was also a need for an alternative to the economic policies that had widened inequalities unmeasurably since the onset of neoliberal reforms. How this could be wrought despite the class contradictions of political parties was a tightrope walk that Yechury learned to perform with ease.
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It was no secret that several policies and measures undertaken by the first United Progressive Alliance government and the emergence of a Common Minimum Programme had the strong imprint of the Left. This imprint continued in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election in the forging of the INDIA bloc and the concerns its parties raised.
Yechury’s ability to get disparate political parties to communicate with each other and rally them together to create for an anti-BJP front has been written about in various tributes. There was no disconnect between his personality and his politics. His personality was immeasurably shaped by his politics.
His commitment to socialism and to the masses remained unwavering. And that is what he should ideally be remembered for.