The Author is a Delhi-based senior journalist and Director of the Jagaran Institute of Media Studies. He was an outstanding scholar and student leader in Jawaharlal Nehru University in the early eighties and went on to become the President of JNUSU. He later on served as Resident Editor of the Times of India and also Hindustan Times at Patna. His views are always above political affiliations and based on facts. We thank him for honouring us with his write up – an obituary on Sitaram Yechury. – Editor
When Sudhir Patnaik asked me to send a small write-up on Sitaram Yechury, a person I knew since my JNU days, I wondered: where to begin and where to end? For, it is not just my personal memory that I must write about. Sitaram was a public persona; he was in the national limelight for at least the last three decades.
When I met Sita, as he was called on the JNU campus for the first time in 1977, he was the president of the JNU Students’s Union, elected on the platform of SFI, the student wing of the CPM. When I met him last a few weeks ago at a JNU ex-students gathering in Delhi, he was the General Secretary of the CPM, the highest position in the party. So, it was a remarkable journey of a political activist from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. Sita indeed rose through the ranks.
Sita left his Ph D program midway to devote time to organisational activities, first as the president of the Delhi state SFI and later as the president of the all-India SFI. As a member of the CPM too, Sita rose rapidly. He became the youngest member of the Central Committee of the CPM at the age of 34. He set a record in the party by becoming a Politburo member at the age of 40.
Sitaram’s popularity was not just because he was a major CPM leader all these years; his name to fame was that he was a key figure in opposition politics in the last three decades. It is ironic that in the 1990s, Sitaram was part of the gargantuan effort to bring together the anti-Congress forces, an effort in which the prime interlocutor was Harkishen Singh Surjit, Sitaram’s mentor in the CPM. After Surjit passed away, the burden of carrying the opposition together fell on Sitaram’s arms. But there was a twist in the tale with the passage of time. At the dawn of the new century, Sitaram emerged as a pivot in the opposition politics against the BJP. And in this new crusade, the Congress party became the comrade in arms. So, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a fight against the authoritarian establishment of the Congress; in the last two decades, Sitaram expended his energy in stitching together an alliance against the communal BJP.
Why did Sitaram emerge as a key player in the political firmament in all these years? The reason was both political and personal. It was political because the CPM had emerged as a major national party for more than three decades — from the 1980s till the first decade of the 21st century. The CPM was in power in West Bengal uninterrupted for more than three decades. In Kerala, the CPM and the Congress have been alternating in power since independence. The CPM had a stranglehold on Tripura for more than two decades. It was hardly surprising that during the United Front days against the Congress in the 1990s, the West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu was the unanimous choice for the position of the Prime Minister. It was a different matter that the CPM Politburo declined the invitation and only offered to extend support from the outside. It is on record how Sitaram, as the understudy of Surjit, played a crucial role in the United Front politics and policies.
Fast forward to 2004. The BJP government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee had lost the election, but the Congress, the leading opposition party, was well short of a majority. The CPM, with its 56 MPs in Parliament had emerged as the kingmaker in that election; the CPM agreed to give outside support to a Congress-led UPA government, provided it had a say in the framing of the policy of the government. Prakash Karat, then the general secretary of the party, was, of course, the face of the CPM during the UPA I years. But Sitaram was also a prominent player as he, along with Karat, were the two representatives of the CPM in the UPA coordination committee.
In fact, it has been widely reported how Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury differed on the issue of Indo-American cooperation in the civil nuclear deal. Prakash was insistent that the CPM would withdraw support if the Manmohan Singh government did not scrap the deal; but Sitaram was of the view the nuclear deal didn’t mean much to the common masses. The CPM should take the drastic step that might lead to the fall of the government only if the UPA legislated any anti-worker or anti-poor policies or if the UPA government didn’t agree to any pro-farmer, pro-worker, or pro-poor policies proposed by the CPM. That would show that CPM stood firmly with the underprivileged. The nuclear deal was immaterial from the point of view of the marginalised sections, Sitaram argued. But Prakash Karat carried the day in the party, and the CPM withdrew support from the Manmohan government.
The CPM was politically isolated during the UPA II regime, as it was not part of the ruling coalition; on the other hand, the party could not make common cause with the BJP, which was the main opposition. Those days, Sitaram, as a Member of the Rajya Sabha, kept highlighting the issues of the common man during his stellar interventions on the floor of Parliament.
In 2014, when the UPA was overthrown and the BJP rode to power with Narendra Modi as its mascot, the CPM found a common cause with the Congress and other opposition parties. Of course, by this time, there was a change in the political fortunes of the party. The CPM had been decimated in West Bengal. It was also out of office in Kerala. Its lordship extended only to the tiny state of Tripura. When CPM had shrunk visibly and rapidly, Sitaram was elevated to wear the crown of thorns. He was elected as the General Secretary of the party in 2015. It is true that the CPM, under his watch, wrested power from the Congress in Kerala in 2016, but the party also faced the most humiliating defeat at the hand of the BJP in Tripura in 2018. Today, the CPM has just 4 MPs in Parliament. So the CPM, under Sitaram, was not in very great shape, so his clout based on the organizational strength of the CPM was limited, but Sitaram played a larger-than-life role in the opposition politics in the last 10 years because of his extraordinary personal qualities.
Sita’s strength lay in his ability to communicate and engage with those in non-BJP parties with a strikingly different perception than his own. The sole exception was the TMC in West Bengal, which was not ready to brook any understanding with the CPM, which it conceived as its arch-enemy. The CPM and the Congress are the principal rivals in Kerala. But Sitaram had an extremely close affinity with the Congress leadership. Both the parties struck an alliance in West Bengal. Jairam Ramesh, the Congress general secretary, had, in fact, stirred a hornet’s nest when he said that Sitaram enjoyed more influence in the Congress than in his own party, the CPM. The touching tributes of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi after Sitaram Yechury passed away on 12th September told us how much they valued Sitaram’s friendship. Sitaram played an instrumental role in the formation of the INDIA bloc that achieved reasonable success in presenting a united front against the BJP in the 2024 general election.
Sitaram was a shining star of India’s politics because of the combination of several qualities: he was a handsome man with a cheerful disposition who was ready to engage even with an adversary; he was a well-versed man not only with regard to the ideological formulations but also regarding the current issues plaguing Indian democracy. He could ferret out facts and data instantly to substantiate his argument; what made Sita sparkle was that he was a powerful writer as well as a forceful speaker who could engage with an audience in several languages: Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, and, of course, English. There are not many politicians on the national stage today who personify that extraordinary blend of heart and mind. That explains why Sitaram punched above the weight in national politics. Sitaram’s successor in the CPM will find it difficult to step into the large shoes he has left behind; the anti-BJP opposition will take a long time to discover someone like Sita who can act as a glue to keep the disparate parties together.
Photo credit: Photo credit: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sitaram-yechury-death-collection-stories/article68634113.ece
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