Sitaram Yechury: Remembering comrade who adapted Marxism to Indian reality

Veteran CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury, 72, passes away at Delhi's Aiims

While staying committed to the broad ideological framework of communism and a life-long Marxist-Leninist, Sitaram Yechury was a rare leader within his party with a grasp of the exigencies of electoral politics.

As one of the top leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), at least since early 2000s, Yechury strived to have the country’s Left movement shed its doctrinaire approach to India’s socio-cultural complexities and stitch electoral and social alliances to fight the Sangh Parivar.

In that, Yechury, who passed away at 72 on Thursday in New Delhi after battling a severe lung infection, was an inheritor of the political legacy of his mentor, the late Harkishan Singh Surjeet.

 

With Surjeet at the helm of the CPI(M) from 1992 to 2005, Yechury was his chief lieutenant in shaping the 1996 United Front (UF) government and the United Progressive Alliance1 (UPA1) government in 2004. He contributed to the UF government’s common minimum programme, along with the Congress’ P Chidambaram, and was one of the architects of a similar document drafted for the UPA1 government.

In neighbouring Nepal, Yechury prodded that country’s Maoist rebels to transition from their pursuit of peoples’ war to join its multi-party democracy. As the head of the International Department of the party’s Central Committee, Yechury was also the CPI(M)’s face abroad.

Yechury’s unease with then CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat over the Left’s opposition to the India-US nuclear deal in 2008 is well documented. But there is some dispute whether Karat and he made a common cause, or were on opposing sides, in 1996 in persuading the CPI(M)’s Central Committee to reject the proposal that Jyoti Basu, then West Bengal chief minister, become Prime Minister.

Basu, however, remained fond of Yechury till the end of his life, and the latter would visit him whenever he was in Kolkata. Basu told a CPI(M) insider once that he had thought of the external affairs ministry portfolio for Yechury. On the nuclear deal, Yechury said in 2015 that the CPI(M) should have withdrawn support from the UPA1 on livelihood issues, not the nuclear deal that people could not fathom.

In private conversation, Yechury could come across as a pragmatic communist, more a social democrat, and even offer insights into the reasons for the decline of the Soviet Union. As an explanation to what ailed communist-ruled countries, Yechury once said one of his favourite films on the subject was the 1966 Cuban comedy movie Death of a Bureaucrat. It documented the travails of the widow of a revolutionary in securing pension and was a commentary on the red tape of the communist country.

Yechury was born into a Telugu family on August 12, 1952, and studied economics at St. Stephen’s College and Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he was thrice elected president of its students’ union. He was arrested during the Emergency in 1975. He was inducted into the CPI(M)’s Central Committee in 1985 and into its Polit Bureau in 1992.

He was also one of the few among leading communist leaders to appreciate the importance of the Left movement’s cultural engagement, and was a permanent attendee at cultural events that Sahmat organised. Old associates recalled that they would walk down to Chanakya, a movie theatre, to watch films. A polyglot, he was always accessible to party comrades, chatting with them in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and English in the party canteen over cups of black tea and unfiltered cigarettes. He drove his own car, a Maruti Zen, until he became party chief.   

Yechury was a Rajya Sabha member from 2005 to 2017, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi a frequent visitor to his room in Parliament, where they chatted for hours. He was elected general secretary of the CPI(M), succeeding Karat, in 2015, when it was in steep electoral decline. However, Yechury galvanised the party’s outreach to farmers, Dalit groups, students and minorities. In 2019, when the CPI(M) Central Committee rejected a proposal to have an understanding with the Congress for the Lok Sabha polls, Yechury had offered to resign. He was a key leader that helped forge the INDIA bloc for the 2024 polls.

Yechury is survived by his wife, Seema Chishti, a son, and a daughter. His elder son, Ashish Yechury, passed away due to Covid in 2021.