Farewell, comrade: Sitaram Yechury was committed to making the Left responsive to political tides

Amidst the many ways that one can look back at the life of Sitaram Yechury, the most characteristic aspect of his political presence was the link between the core of the institutional Left with the impulse of India’s mainstream national politics. He never let his standing and depth – as a theoretician and Marxist thinker – come in the way of his efforts to make the Left accessible and responsive to the currents of political flux.

Despite his scholarly grasp over communist literature, Yechury refused to be dogmatic in the role he envisaged for the Left’s engagement with political impulse and its unfolding dynamics. That perhaps remains the most striking imprint of his five-decade political career, embodying different strands of Left politics and power play in the country.

Yechury rose through the ranks of student politics to the top echelons of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). At the time of his death last evening, he was in the midst of his third term as general secretary of the CPIM, a position he had first been elected to in 2015. That, however, also means his elevation to the top coincided with the Left being at its weakest in national and state politics.

For someone like Yechury, who had been a member of the party’s central committee from the age of 32, and who found a place in the Polit Bureau in 1992 when he was 40, it did seem like it was just a matter of time before he got the top post. But the challenge for him was the delicate period in which he took charge – a juncture when the party’s influence was limited to Kerala. West Bengal had been wrested by the Trinamool Congress in 2011, while Tripura went the Bharatiya Janata Party’s way later in 2018. 

But among his top-rung party comrades, Yechury was strategically more equipped to navigate such testing times, and retain relevance and political space.

Sitaram Yechury was born in a Telugu-speaking family in post-independent India on August 12, 1952. Both his parents were government servants. After completing his schooling with an outstanding record in Andhra Pradesh, he moved to St Stephen’s College and then to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi for higher studies in economics. 

It was at JNU that Yechury found his calling as a political activist and later as a leader of the Students’ Federation of India, the CPIM’s student wing. Along with his senior Prakash Karat, he consolidated the Left’s stronghold over student politics in the JNU campus. This is etched in public memory in the form of an almost iconic photograph.

The photo shows Yechury reading out the student body’s resolution to the university’s ex-officio chancellor, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, with demands that included a call for her resignation from the chancellor’s post.

Yechury went on to become president of the SFI, breaking the precedence of only student leaders from West Bengal or Kerala leading the student organisation. When the CPIM became a key ally of the Congress-led UPA-I under Dr Manmohan Singh, he had already completed a decade-and-a-half stint in the Polit Bureau. Unlike the CPIM’s general secretary at the time, he favoured giving more space to alliance partners, not letting differences snowball into impasses and eventual parting of ways. 

This was clear in how Yechury was not on the same page with Karat’s decision to withdraw support to the UPA-I government over the India-US nuclear deal in 2008. Despite being a critic of American foreign policy, he did not lose sight of the larger picture and the need for pragmatic reciprocity of ties between countries and also among allies in a coalition. This position, he believed, could be strategically reached without giving up the core of the Marxist approach. 

In shunning the rigidities of dogmatism, Yechury found a way to build bridges with the Congress and other parties to stitch a broadly left-of-centre national alternative. In the face of the realities of national politics, he argued that the imperative of coalition politics could not be held hostage to differences between allies. In doing so, he came across as a strategist following the Trotskyist line: “March separately but strike together.”

But this strategist within him, and his pragmatic outlook, did not mean that he couldn’t return to classic Marxist positions in his critique of politics and conduct of political actors. One remembers, for instance, when a slew of corruption scams rocked the UPA-II government. At the time, Yechury recalled the Marxist lexicon to quip that the term ‘crony capitalism’ was a tautology as the structures of cronyism were inherent in the system. 

It was a moment of ideological clarity from a Marxist whose pragmatism hadn’t let him lose touch with the wider fold of Marxist dialectics. This could also be seen in his interventions when, as the head of his party’s foreign policy wing, he dissected the currents of international politics and people’s movements with the prism of the international Left’s worldview. 

In his stint as a parliamentarian from 2005 to 2017 as a Rajya Sabha MP from West Bengal, Yechury blended theoretical analysis with a dissection of immediate issues and policies. He lucidly articulated the Left’s perspective on the issue of the day. In the process, his interventions in the Upper House offered useful counterviews and enriched debates. Some of the memorable moments from his 12-year innings include his remarks during the removal proceedings of a Calcutta High Court judge in 2011 and his debate with Arun Jaitley on sedition in 2016. 

In the challenging and eventful years for the Marxist stream in India’s public life, Sitaram Yechury’s presence meant a constant effort to adapt the Left worldview to Indian social realities and political currents. In strategically recalibrating communist politics in India, he signalled the need for an intellectual reassessment and an organisational reset in the Left’s approach to politics. That was a form of dialectics he applied to the Indian scene as an ever-evolving student of the Marxist praxis. 

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