In Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Dr Anand Teltumbde, a distinguished public intellectual, and leading authority on the Dalit movement, presents a groundbreaking biography of Dr B.R. Ambedkar. Teltumbde strips away the layers of myth and hyperbole to reveal the man behind the legend.

Teltumbde delves into the life of Ambedkar, situating him within the dynamic context of his time. He explores the complexities of Ambedkar’s persona, offering a nuanced portrait that challenges conventional perceptions. Rich with photographs, this biography paints a vivid picture of Ambedkar as a visionary, as a human, and above all, as an iconoclast driven by a relentless pursuit of social justice and equality. From his tireless advocacy for the Dalit community to his visionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Ambedkar’s legacy reverberates through the ages, inspiring generations to strive for a more just society. An excerpt from the chapter “Dalits get their leader”:

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While striking the Poona Pact, Gandhi promised to devote himself to the task of eradicating untouchability. Just five days after signing the Poona Pact, Gandhi founded the All India Anti Untouchability League on 30 September 1932, which was later renamed as Harijan Sevak Sangh (Servants of Untouchables Society). At the time, industrialist Ghanshyam Das Birla was its founding president with Amritlal Thakkar as its secretary. In 1933, Gandhi renamed his newspaper Young India as Harijan, and undertook a twenty-one-day ‘self-purication fast’ against untouchability. He asked for a message for the inaugural issue of Harijan from Ambedkar, to which Ambedkar sent a blunt reply: ‘I feel I cannot give a message. For I believe it will be a most unwarranted presumption on my part to suppose that I have sufficient worth in the eyes of the Hindus which would make them treat any message from me with respect . . . I am therefore sending you the accompanying statement for publication in your Harijan.’

The essence of his statement was what he would elaborate on in his Annihilation of Caste after four years: ‘Nothing can emancipate the Out-caste except the destruction of the Caste system. Nothing can help to save Hindus and ensure their survival in the coming struggle except the purging of the Hindu Faith of this odious and vicious dogma.’

Gandhi also took a march across the country from November 1933 through August 1934, covering 12,500 miles by vehicle and foot and collecting Rs 8,00,000 for the Harijan fund. Ambedkar was taken onboard of the Anti-Untouchability League, one of the three Untouchables among the total nine members. He anticipated it to be a comprehensive civil rights group focused on securing civic liberties for Dalits, including access to public spaces, utilization of public amenities, and broader civil freedoms, all under Dalit control.

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However, Gandhi transformed it into a paternalistic organization, overseen by caste Hindus aiming for the ‘upliftment’ of Untouchables. This stemmed from his fundamental philosophy, which regarded untouchability as a sin within Hinduism, to be expiated by the Hindus. It was not an inherent aspect of the religion, but rather a flaw that could be rectified. According to Gandhi, upper-caste Hindus should acknowledge and atone for this sin, make reparations, and undertake initiatives for the purification and elevation of Dalits. This involved activities such as engaging in slum clean-up efforts, advocating against alcoholism, promoting vegetarianism, and similar endeavours.

Ambedkar proposed that the League could undertake a campaign for intercaste marriages and intercaste dining so as to weaken castes. But the League rejected it. All the untouchable members resigned immediately.

For Ambedkar, the entire plan of the Harijan Sevak Sangh was worse than useless. He condemned the Harijan Sevak Sangh in strong language: ‘The work of the Sangh is of the most inconsequential kind. It does not catch anyone’s imagination. It neglects the most urgent purposes for which the Untouchables need help and assistance. The Sangh rigorously excludes the Untouchables from its management. The Untouchables are no more than beggars, mere recipients of charity.’

After induction on the Board of the Anti-Untouchability League formed in the aftermath of the Poona Pact, Ambedkar wrote a six-page letter on 14 November 1932 to A.V. Thakkar, general secretary, outlining his views on the concrete programme to be taken up by the League. Pointing out the need to take up a campaign to secure civil rights for the Depressed Classes, he preferred the behavioural school that focuses on amelioration of the social environment as against improvement in individual behaviour, as it believes that the latter is largely conditioned by the former.

He explained, ‘It starts with the hypothesis that the fate of the individual is governed by the environment and the circumstances he is obliged to live under, and if an individual is suffering from want and misery it is because his environment is not propitious.’ He cautioned that it would entail violence in rural areas and ‘criminal prosecutions of one side or the other’. He also pointed out that in these struggles ‘the Depressed Classes will suffer badly because the Police and the Magistracy will always be against them’. ‘The Police and Magistracy are corrupt as they could be, but what is worse is that they are definitely political in the sense that they are out not to see that justice is done, but to see that the dignity and interests of the caste Hindus as against the Depressed Classes are upheld.’ Therefore, he recommended the League to create an army of workers in the rural parts, ‘who will encourage the Depressed Classes to fight for their rights and will help them in any legal proceedings arising therefrom to a successful issue’. He emphasized that ‘this programme involves social disturbance and even bloodshed. But I do not think that it can be avoided’.

The other measures he proposed were: creating equality of opportunity, social intercourse and employment of an agency to carry out the programme. This reflected a profound learning from his experience in Mahad wherein he thwarted the counterattack by the Dalits when they were attacked by the caste Hindu goons for polluting the Chowdar Tank. It does not spell just resistance, which in any case needed to follow as part of the struggle, but more importantly it becomes a cultural shock to challenge their age-old customs and traditions. His attitude to violence also reveals that there are situations where violence is inevitable. If he concedes that violence could not be avoided in a simple case of changing peoples’ behaviour, he would surely see what would entail if the societal economic structure needed to be overhauled. The question of violence or non-violence is not a question of principle, it is a question of strategy. He rightly reads here violence as being a constitutive element of any secure social order.

Also Read | How London taught Ambedkar to ‘educate, agitate, organise’

The other measures he suggested were bringing about ‘equality of opportunity’, social intercourse, and employing an agency to implement the programme.

This letter with such a clear-headed contribution was not even acknowledged by Thakkar. The League continued work under the influence of Gandhian paternalism and did not want even to seek views of the Depressed Class members. Realising it, Ambedkar resigned from the League, which was later followed by P. Balu, Srinivasan and Rajah.

He concluded that the Untouchables see the Sangh ‘as a foreign body set up by the Hindus with some ulterior motive… the whole object is to create a slave mentality among the Untouchables towards their Hindu masters’. This, to Ambedkar, was the major thrust of paternalism. More importantly, he explicated, ‘The outcaste is a byproduct of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system. Nothing can help Hindus and ensure their survival in the coming struggle except, the purging of Hindu faith of this odious and vicious dogma.’

If only this principle was stressed in the Constituent Assembly, the euphoria over the abolition of untouchability could have been punctured and possibly the intrigues to preserve castes with an alibi of social justice could have been thwarted. Unfortunately, not only would he not raise this issue in the Constituent Assembly but when raised by others would choose to stay quiet.

Excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House India from Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar by Anand Teltumbde.

Bordering national capital Delhi, Haryana is among the richest states in India, with a per capita income ( ₹2.96 lakh in 2022-23) about 1.7 times the national average. While the numbers would suggest people in the state are better off than their compatriots elsewhere, the locals do not quite see things that way.

Kulana, for instance, is another world compared to the prosperous and urbanized parts of the state, far from the luxury-car outlets along Grand Trunk Road and gated high-rises in urban Gurgaon. An estimated 65% of the population lives in villages, and this rustic backyard is today setting the agenda for the elections.

Unlike in earlier years, when the assembly poll was a multi-cornered contest, the polls this year are a straight fight between the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled Haryana for two back-to-back terms, and the opposition Indian National Congress (INC), which has ruled the state off and on since its founding. It will be the first head-to-head fight between the two national parties since the 2024 general election.

Unlike in earlier years, when the assembly poll was a multi-cornered contest, the polls this year are a straight fight between the incumbent BJP and the opposition Indian National Congress

It is an election that will be decided by issues such as farm woes, frustration with the army’s recruitment policy, lack of job avenues, and the anguish of the state’s vaunted wrestlers. Most of all it will be decided by which way Haryana’s castes choose to lean.

Farm distress dominates

Any discussion on the Haryana election usually begins with the problems farmers in the state face. While the agriculture sector contributes just about 16% to the state’s gross domestic product, farm issues and farmer angst have dominated its political landscape in recent years.

Political parties have been going all out to pacify and woo farmers. With good reason; the state has been a hotbed of farmer protests in recent years. It started in end-2020, when a mass agitation began after the Centre introduced a set of farm laws to reform the agriculture markets. The protests were led by farmers from neighbouring Punjab and Haryana, who picketed Delhi’s doorstep for more than a year, until the three laws were repealed in 2021.

A fresh round of agitations started this February, with farmers demanding legal status for the government’s minimum support price (MSP) regime. MSP is the price at which the Centre purchases crops, mostly rice and wheat. The farmers want this to be a legal obligation for 24 non-perishable crops. When the farmers decided to march on Delhi again, a face-off ensued, with the Haryana police firing teargas shells and rubber bullets on the protesters.

“We are going to plant mustard (a winter oilseed) now, but fertilizers are not available. The state government procures only a limited quantity of crops like mustard and bajra (at MSP) but payments are often delayed by months,” complained Amit Kumar, a farmer from Kulana. The village, unlike more fertile areas such as Karnal and Ambala, grows less rice and more of other crops, including bajra (pearl millet), as there isn’t enough water available for irrigation.

Hawa Singh, a 73-year-old farmer from Sonipat, complained that rising expenses on farming have pushed him to reduce spending on household items. “The Centre is giving ₹6,000 every year (under the PM-Kisan scheme) to farmers, but I end up paying many times more, because of the 18% GST (goods and services tax) on pesticides, and steep prices of diesel (used to run farm machinery),” he said.

However, state BJP leaders appear confident about winning the farm vote and a third term. “Farmer leaders may be unhappy but real farmers are satisfied with BJP’s performance. The state purchased 14 crops at MSP and it is paying farmers ₹1,000 per acre for not burning paddy stubble (which worsens air pollution during the winter months in the National Capital Region). Congress is fuelling protests for electoral benefits,” said Surjit Kumar Jayni, BJP in-charge of Fatehabad assembly seat.

To be sure, not all farmers are in step with the protests. For instance, a large number of them grow vegetables to supply Delhi’s markets. They depend less on state support and more on market-determined prices as an MSP has not been announced for perishable crops. “We suffered a lot during the farmer agitation of 2020-2021 as roads were blocked and vegetables could not be transported to the Azadpur mandi (in Delhi),” said Dharmendra, a 46-year-old farmer from Dipalpur village in Sonipat, Haryana.

In a bid to win over the farmers, the Congress has promised to provide a legal guarantee for MSP. But the BJP has questioned this; addressing farmers at a rally earlier this month, Prime Minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi said that the Congress has not done so in states where it is in power (Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh) and is making a false promise to farmers in Haryana. Modi also asserted that the Centre has removed the minimum export price on premium Basmati rice, which will help growers from the state earn more (the crop will be harvested beginning October).

Job and wrestler angst

The lack of decent jobs is another cause of angst, particularly among the landless. “Four of my children are graduates but none has a proper job,” said Shiv Kumar, a non-teaching staff member at a local private school in Hisar, and resident of a Valmiki mohalla (a settlement of families belonging to scheduled castes) next to Kulana. “It’s a struggle to manage daily expenses with my meagre earnings,” adds Kumar, who supplements a monthly pay of ₹5,000 with casual wage work.

The Congress has been raising the issue of unemployment, tying it with the new army recruitment scheme. “Thousands of youngsters from Haryana are illegally migrating to the USA, risking their lives, because they do not have jobs here. Families are selling land to send their children abroad… because they do not have the option of a secure army job anymore,” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said at an election rally in Hisar, Haryana.

The Congress has not provided MSP in states where it is in power and is making a false promise to farmers in Haryana.
-Narendra Modi

The BJP’s Jayni countered this by saying that the state government had created 150,000 jobs during its term, in a clean and transparent manner.

In comparison with some states, Haryana certainly seems to be performing better. The unemployment rate among graduates in the state is at 6.6%, about half the national average, as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2023-24.

A protest by female wrestlers has also become an emotive issue in rural Haryana. Wrestlers from the state have won multiple Olympic medals. Last January, Sakshi Malik (Olympic bronze medalist in 2016) and Vinesh Phogat led a protest in Delhi alleging sexual harassment of women wrestlers by former head of the wrestling federation and former BJP parliamentarian Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. The ‘daughters of the state’ being dragged on the streets of the national capital by the police touched a raw nerve.

Phogat, who attained celebrity status after assuring herself of at least a silver medal at the Paris Olympics in August only to be disqualified for being overweight by 100 gm, is contesting the elections on a Congress ticket from Julana assembly seat.

“Our sisters and daughters were dragged along the streets of Delhi. Anyone who protests, be it farmers or women wrestlers, is termed anti-national. This anger will be reflected on polling day,” said former wrestler Bajrang Punia, who is currently the chairman of farmer’s wing of the Congress party. He won a bronze medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and happens to be Vinesh’s brother-in-law.

The caste factor

Politics in Haryana has always been dominated by caste. Jats, an agrarian upper caste, who comprise about a quarter of the state’s population, traditionally align with the Congress. Other Backward Castes or OBCs account for about 30% and the BJP has banked heavily on their support. Dalits (Scheduled Castes) make up another 20% of the electorate. The saffron party is hopeful of winning a third term by again riding on a consolidation of non-Jat votes.

In the 2019 state elections, the BJP won 40 out of 90 seats with a vote share of 36.5%. It formed the government in alliance with the Jananayak Janata Party (JJP), which had won ten seats. This time around, the JJP, which got 15% of the vote and won 10 seats in the 2019 polls, is facing the wrath of the Jats for supporting the BJP. Party chief Dushyant Chautala has said he made a mistake by continuing as the deputy chief minister during the farmers’ agitation in 2020/21. Indeed, amid the clash between the BJP and Congress, other parties, including the AAP, INLD, and BSP, seem to have become a sideshow in this election.

In the general elections held earlier this year, the BJP’s vote share dropped by 12 percentage points from the 2019 general elections to 46%, while the Congress saw its vote share rise by 15 percentage points to 44%. As a result, the BJP lost five of the state’s ten Lok Sabha seats to the Congress.

In March, just a month before the Lok Sabha polls, and with six months remaining for the state elections, the BJP replaced chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, who had helmed the state for nine years, with Nayab Singh Saini, in a bid to counter anti-incumbency. Khattar belongs to the Khatri caste, a minority Punjabi upper caste community, and was Haryana’s first Punjabi chief minister. Saini, who belongs to the OBC community, is the BJP’s answer to the dominant Jats.

A reading of the BJP manifesto for the state elections shows it is going all out to woo every section of the electorate. It has promised to procure 24 crops for which MSP is announced, a monthly cash transfer of ₹2,100 to women, a ₹10 lakh health insurance scheme, a guaranteed government job to Agniveers (after their four-year stint in the Army) and creating 200,000 government jobs for the youth.

The Congress, too, has promised a monthly cash transfer to women over 18 years of age, cooking gas at ₹500 per cylinder, ₹6,000 pension for elderly and widows, a caste census, restoration of the old pension scheme for government employees, and a legal guarantee on MSP for farmers. In addition, it has promised to provide ₹25 lakh health insurance and government jobs to families who lost a member during the farmer agitation.

While both parties seem to be offering similar sops, it is the state’s caste dynamics that are likely to determine the outcome of the election. On that front, the Congress could find itself on the backfoot with the Dalit vote.

Caste arithmetic is a big factor. The Congress is banking on a consolidation of Jat and Dalit votes, while the BJP is wooing OBCs. Both parties have promised multiple welfare benefits.

A shadow fight is taking place between Bhupinder Hooda, the Congress’s tallest Jat leader and former state chief minister, and Kumari Selja, the party’s Dalit face in Haryana, who is a former central minister and currently a member of Parliament from the Sirsa constituency. In the runup to the state elections, Selja has been noticeably absent from campaigning after being sidelined by Hooda and not being given much of a say in the party’s choice of candidates.

The BJP is banking on that rift, with Modi launching a tirade against Congress at his election rally in Sonipat on 25 September. “The Dalits of Haryana are seeing the drama happening within Congress. If Congress comes back to power the infighting within the party will destroy Haryana,” Modi warned.

Citing the Hansi assembly seat in Hisar as an example of how caste equations could play out, Yoginder Yogi, a local Congress leader said, “Of the 200,000 voters in Hansi, 48,000 are Jats. Whether the Congress will win this seat depends on how the Dalits and OBCs (about 120,000 together) vote. In the 2024 general elections, there was a consolidation of Dalit votes in favour of Congress. But the current internal dynamics of the party could hurt that Jat-Dalit alliance.”

Brewing discontent

The age limit for recruitment in the Indian army was reduced from 23 years to 21 years when the Agnipath scheme was launched in 2022. This seems to be a major grouse among young aspirants. In Sherpura village of Sirsa district, Kulwant Kumar missed his last shot at joining the army after he failed to qualify this year. “I have not thought of what to do next, maybe tend to cattle like my friends do,” said Kumar, 21, son of a small farmer, who will vote for the first time in these elections.

The lack of jobs and a 2022 change in the Indian Army’s recruitment policy to a short-service tenure of four years—known as the Agnipath Scheme—have demotivated the youth, say Congress leaders. “Joining the Army used to be a hope and a mark of financial security for youth from poorer families. You could see hundreds of them running on the streets every morning (preparing for the recruitment physical). Now, these dejected youth are getting into drugs and petty crime,” said Congress leader Punia.

According to Sandeep Sinwar, a farmer and activist from Sirsa, more than 50 youth from the village used to prepare for recruitment in the Army until a few years ago. “That is no longer an option now. We have been actively organizing village-level meetings to dissuade youngsters from falling for drugs, and getting into petty crime,” Sinwar said.

Will this discontent in rural Haryana outdo the support for BJP in urban sections? It certainly appears that way, say two political observers Mint spoke to. “The best case scenario for the BJP would be to win at least 35 seats by maintaining its tally in the urban and industrial belts of south Haryana (Gurgaon, Faridabad, Bhiwani),” said Rahul Verma, political scientist and fellow at Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.

“The BJP had everything going in its favour in 2019. Now, there is a desire for change. Still it would hope that factors like visible Jat dominance and infighting within Congress will help its cause,” said Verma. “Last time, it was a division of Jat votes between Congress and JJP that helped the BJP to form the government. But this time a division in Jat votes looks unlikely.”

Last time, it was a division of Jat votes between Congress and JJP that helped BJP to form the government.
-Rahul Verma

 

Yogendra Yadav, political activist and a former psephologist, who is a native of Rewari in Haryana, also believes the Congress will do well. “Large parts of what we call urban Haryana—towns like Karnal or Rohtak—are not strikingly different from the psychological and social structure of its villages, except for Gurgaon, which is an outlier,” he explained.

“After a few days of travelling in Haryana, it seems like more than half of the outcome of these elections was pre-decided by the electorate even before the campaign began. The current chief minister is more popular than the former one (Khattar). But we cannot forget that even in 2019, BJP did not get a clear mandate—the state had almost voted for a change,” Yadav added. “My sense is, this time it will be a clear verdict in favour of Congress.”

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.

Also Read | Sitaram Yechury: ‘The BJP should understand that without States, there is no India’

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 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.

Also Read | ‘BJP’s defeat imperative to protect democracy’: Sitaram Yechury

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.

Yogendra Yadav, the political analyst, both comments on and analyses political processes. He is also a participant in politics as an activist and political worker. In 2024, he was a phenomenal predictor of electoral outcome. “Indian society is a pyramid. The top of the pyramid has been captured by the BJP in terms of caste, class, and gender. The bottom of the pyramid is the biggest social force to defend the Constitution, republic, and democracy in the country. So future politics has to be politics of the bottom of the pyramid. BJP’s political strategy has been to capture the top of the pyramid and walk away with a few slices from the bottom,” he tells Frontline.

Also Read | A vote for constitutional values

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Saba Naqvi is a Delhi-based journalist and author of four books who writes on politics and identity issues.