Sitaram Yechury: A comrade of his time

Ever since India attained Independence, a fundamental question has divided the country’s communists, in terms of both ideology and tactic: How should a “revolutionary movement”, keeping with Marxist principles, engage with the complex set of social factors and political actors of a country this layered and so diverse? This question became more pronounced, and the answers to it more nuanced, with the rise of the BJP as one of two major national parties since the late ’80s. Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), who died at 72 on Thursday, was seen by many as a “pragmatic comrade” — unlike the “hardliners”, who are opposed to working with the Congress, not just the BJP. Along with his predecessor Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Yechury was an alliance builder since the days of the United Front governments of the 1990s. In an era of renewed coalition politics post the 2024 general election, Yechury was not merely a comrade and guide for communists — he played that role for the INDIA bloc as a whole. It will be difficult for the Opposition to find another figure with his ideological and moral clarity, as well as political-tactical nimbleness.

Yechury, along with colleague, friend, and sometimes rival Prakash Karat, began his political career in JNU, where he was thrice the student union president. He was involved in the anti-Emergency movement and spent some time in prison. In 1992, Yechury and Karat entered the CPM politburo — among the youngest to be inducted — and were seen as the future of the party in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. As one of the most articulate voices of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Yechury soon became the face of the party and was seen to advocate close ties with the Congress. Like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the former CM of West Bengal who died last month, Yechury recognised that changing politics demanded that the dogmas of 20th-century communism were revisited. In 2008, delivering a lecture on EMS Namboodiripad’s birth centenary, Yechury spoke of how the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” (one of Lenin’s descriptions of the Marxist dialectic) in India demanded an issue-based alliance with the Congress as well as an engagement with the social faultlines in India — including and especially, caste inequality. For decades, communist hardliners had barely engaged with caste. Even in his so-called pragmatism, Yechury was a staunch communist.