The death of Sitaram Yechury, veteran communist and general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), leaves a significant void for the left in India at a time the party seeks to reclaim its relevance in politics and counter the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). His ability to navigate political complexities and foster cooperation between unlikely allies to stitch together political coalitions was seen as a crucial asset in an era of polarised politics.
"Marxism is a creative science. It's not a formula or dogma," Yechury said in an interview given to writer Paul Zacharia in 2020, on the centenary year of communism in India. For Yechury, politics was the art of the possible as long as it could drive a change in historical conditions conducive to the left in India.
An affable leader with a penchant for political pragmatism, Yechury had the ability to engage with allies and adversaries. He remained one of the most prominent nodes of intense struggle over the political-tactical line the party should pursue over electoral alignment with the Congress in every election. The line he pushed, however, was never palatable to leaders from states like Kerala, for whom having any truck with the Congress party was existential.
When Yechury was elected the general secretary of the party in 2015 in place of Prakash Karat, the stark contrast in their personalities was evident. Karat was a dogmatic hardliner; Yechury, a moderate and suave networker who favoured tactical alliances. But for the party that sees dialectics as the core driving force of its ideology, it was perfectly legitimate.
But the tactical-political line boomeranged on Yechury, who had pushed for an alliance with the Congress with backing from Buddhadeb Bhattacharya after the party's West Bengal debacle in 2016. The CPI(M) suffered a humiliating loss, winning only 26 seats compared to 40 seats in 2011, while their ally Congress increased their seat tally by two with 42 seats.
In the same year, the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front wrested power from the Congress-led coalition in Kerala. This victory was seen as vindication of the ‘Visakhapatnam line’ – a resolution adopted during the party’s 21st conference in Vizag held in 2015 – that did not favour political alliance with the Congress party.
Born into a Telugu-speaking Brahmin family in 1952 – his father was an engineer and mother, a government official – in Andhra Pradesh, Yechury's political journey began in the turbulent 1970s, a time of great upheaval in India’s political landscape. He moved to Delhi as a school student, at the height of the Telangana movement in 1969, after his studies were disrupted. It was here, as a young student, that his political consciousness sharpened but his academic dossier remained intact.
In 1970, he emerged as the top performer in the Higher Secondary examinations. In 1973, he graduated with a first-class degree in Economics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University. He pursued his MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), securing first-class honours again in 1975, though his academic journey was interrupted during the Emergency when he was arrested. It prevented him from completing his PhD.
“We would go there (to Munirka, an area near JNU) in the middle of the night, wake up the shopkeeper, get the pamphlets (against Emergency) copied, and smuggle them into the campus,” Yechury told The Hindu in 2020.
Yechury’s early political engagement was shaped by his involvement with the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the CPI(M), which he joined in 1974. His long association with the CPI(M) formally began in 1975, the year of his arrest. He was elected SFI president at the Dum Dum Conference in 1984. In the same year, Yechury, barely 32 years old, was invited to the Central Committee of the CPI(M), where he continued his steady rise. Groomed by P Sundarayya and Harkishan Singh Surjeet in the early years of his career, he was elected to the party’s Central Secretariat in 1988 and to the Polit Bureau in 1992 at the age of 40, becoming one of the most prominent faces of the party nationally.
He played a key role in organising resistance to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In 1977, after his return to JNU, Prakash Karat proposed his name as the presidential candidate for the JNUSU polls, and was elected, which cemented his position as a leading student leader. He was elected as the president of JNU Students' Union three times. In 1977, after Indira Gandhi lost elections held after the Emergency was withdrawn, Yechury, as president of the JNUSU, led a protest to her residence, seeking her resignation as chancellor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Indira Gandhi came out to listen to the demands and resigned the next day.
In 1996, Yechury played a role in the formation of the United Front government. He collaborated with P Chidambaram to draft the Common Minimum Programme agreement for the Union government led by HD Deve Gowda. The CMP document laid a heavy focus on agricultural development, employment generation, and welfare measures. He also played an active role, along with CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet, in building the coalition during the formation of the United Progressive Alliance government in 2004, after general elections threw up a hung Parliament.
In July 2008, the Left Front withdrew support for the UPA government over the civil nuclear deal with the United States. Calling it “the transmutation of India’s foreign policy into one of acquiescing to US global interests,” Yechury said, “India’s legitimate concern to eliminate terrorism from this planet must echo the twin objective of fighting against both state and individual terrorism. It hardly needs underlining that this can be achieved only through the pursuit of an independent foreign policy and not through the seeking of a contrived convergence with the USA,” as he made a case for a return to independent India’s formative foreign policy of non-alignment.
In the Rajya Sabha, it was Yechury who listed the list of conditions based on which his party would extend support to the controversial deal that would end unfair restrictions on India's nuclear programme.
But Prakash Karat took a political decision to oppose the deal. Sanjaya Baru, writing in The Accidental Prime Minister — The Making And Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, said, "Yechury sounded displeased and helpless" by the development. Seven years later, in 2015, Yechury acknowledged the timing was bad and the party failed to make the deal an election issue.
“Of course, my friend, Jairam Ramesh, said we go back many years, but he didn't complete the whole story... He said, ‘Sitaram Yechury, I call you Sitaram Obituary’, to which I always used to reply to him, saying, ‘This is Jairam mortuary!’.. If his policies are followed, then, you will be in the mortuary,” Sitaram Yechury jovially remarked in his farewell speech in August 2017, as he retired as a Parliamentarian from the Rajya Sabha.
The joke, run by TV channels and newspapers for entertainment, buried other, more pivotal aspects of Yechury’s speech. A stalwart of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Yechury went on to make a case for how the ‘battle against post-truth’ is something that really concerns him.
“Please come back to the realities of what we ask. Please understand the reality. Your farmers are committing suicides, which are growing. Your youth that is going around the country is feeling a sense of insecurity. We are the youngest country in the world. If we can give our youth education, health, and jobs, nobody can stop India from being the leader of knowledge society in the world. We have that potential,” he stated.
The realpolitik aside, Yechury, like several communists, was criticised for sidelining the issue of caste in their ideology. Yechury found himself in a standoff with Dalit leader and founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) Kanshi Ram when he was asked why there weren’t enough Dalits in the CPI(M)-ruled West Bengal.
“I was shocked, so I said let me find out. I discovered many Dalits and tribals. Kanti Biswas was the education minister for many years in West Bengal. I had no idea he was Dalit. We used to travel all across the country in the same coupe. I did not know he was Dalit till Kanshi Ram asked this. The point was these things were never part of our consciousness,” he wrote in Outlook in 2013.
Yechury suffered a personal tragedy in 2021, when he lost his eldest son, Ashish Yechury, a 35-year-old journalist, to COVID-19. An efficient communicator, Yechury spoke five languages, including Telugu, Bangla, Hindi, and English, and has written nine books. He leaves behind his wife, journalist Seema Chisti, the editor of The Wire. He is survived by his daughter, Akhila, and son, Danish.