Sitaram Yechury: Lifelong Leftist who held sway in Delhi despite CPI(M) downturn
Yechury, who was in Rajya Sabha between 2005 and 2017, did his best to ensure Upper House’s Parliament did this, even if it meant going against the tide.
The Rajya Sabha (in India’s old Parliament building, in use till last year), had a red carpet, and the Lok Sabha a green one. Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was fond of remarking that this was because “if the Lok Sabha green-lights any faulty bill, the Rajya Sabha must show it the red light.”
Yechury, who was in the Rajya Sabha between 2005 and 2017, did his best to ensure the Upper House of India’s Parliament did this, even if it meant going against the tide.
Yechury, who died on Thursday, aged 72, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences after contracting a respiratory tract infection -- the first CPI(M) chief to die in office -- was used to arguing for what he believed was right, even if it meant expressing a view contrary to his party’s.
For instance, he maintained that the Left should not withdraw support from a secular government (the United Progressive Alliance) in 2008. He argued that the Left would be unable to claim credit for its interventions for successes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Right to Information Act. When the party decided to still withdraw support, it was a blow to moderates such as Yechury. And a day after the Congress-led government won the trust vote after the withdrawal of support, then external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee had only one visitor in his office, Yechury.
He rose through the ranks, starting his political career as a student leader at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) -- there’s an iconic image of him, then a doctoral student , reading out a charter of demands to Indira Gandhi at the time of the Emergency, demanding her resignation -- and became the CPI(M) chief in 2015. It was under him that the party got into a pre-poll alliance for the first time with Congress and other Opposition parties to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) last year.
During his tenure, the Left bloc won two consecutive assembly elections in 2016 and 2021 in Kerala, a state that has changed government every five years since 1981. A CPI(M) parliamentarian, Amra Ram, was elected for the first time from Rajasthan in the 2024 national polls even as the party and the wider Left bloc failed to gain lost ground, particularly in West Bengal, which it ruled for 34 years. The party has no assembly or Lok Sabha seats in Bengal anymore. It also lost power in Tripura after 25 years in 2018. CPI(M) now has four lawmakers each in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and 78 legislators.
“Sitaram had become the general secretary of the party in its sunset. The CPI(M)’s intellectual base had eroded and the party was full of bureaucrats instead of sharp political minds,” said Dipten Raychowdhury, an analyst of Left politics.
Yechury’s political clout, however, endured despite CPI(M)’s shrinking base. He forged a strong bond with former Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, much to the annoyance of some CPI(M) and Congress leaders. When Congress leader Jairam Ramesh facetiously dubbed Yechury as “CPI(M) general secretary for Congress” at a press conference, Sonia Gandhi reprimanded her colleague for putting Yechury in trouble.
“Sitaram Yechury ji was a friend. A protector of the Idea of India with a deep understanding of our country. I will miss the long discussions we used to have. My sincere condolences to his family, friends, and followers in this hour of grief,” Rahul posted on X.
Yechury was the first non-Congress leader Sonia Gandhi called after she met President APJ Abdul Kalam in May 2004 ahead of the formation of the Congress-led UPA government as she wanted him to set up a meeting with CPI(M) chief Harkishen Singh Surjeet. It was during this meeting that she first communicated her decision not to be Prime Minister, and nominate Manmohan Singh to the post instead. Earlier this year, Yechury, who was also present there, told HT what happened. “Surjeet, down with fever, jumped up from a cot: ‘Kya bol rahi hai tu [what are you saying?]’. And then, at her request, he started calling up alliance leaders to muster support for Manmohan Singh.”
Born in 1952 in what was then Madras, Yechury and his family moved to Hyderabad, then Delhi, where he ranked first in the Central Board of School Education Class 12 exam in 1970. He had a way with languages. Once, he accompanied Surjeet, Jyoti Basu, and two other leaders P Rammurthy and M Basavapunnaiah to China. At breakfast, he spoke to Surjeet in Hindi, Basu in Bengali, Rammurthy in Tamil, and Basavapunnaiah in Kannada, prompting Basu to comment: “This man [Yechury] is dangerous. He is talking in four different languages and although we are sitting here, none of us can understand what he is saying to others.”
“He was a brilliant student who secured a first class in both his undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in economics. He joined the student movement in Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1974 and became a leader of the Students Federation of India. He was thrice elected as President of the JNU Students Union within a span of two years,” a CPI(M) statement said.
He went on to study economics at St Stephen’s College and JNU, where he first met Prakash Karat, a fellow communist.
Yechury and Karat were members of the UPA-Left coordination committee that met regularly to hammer out differences over the India-US nuclear deal. But unlike the ideologically rigid Karat, Yechury was against the Left, which had an all-time high of 60 lawmakers in the 543-member Lok Sabha, withdrawing support from the Congress-led government.
But he was no pushover.
In 2019, armed with the Supreme Court’s direction and a one-way ticket, Yechury was the first “outsider” to enter Srinagar on August 30, 2019, weeks after the effective abrogation of Article 370 and the bifurcation of J&K into two Union territories.
Several other leaders including the Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and former J&K CM Ghulam Nabi Azad had tried—and failed — to enter Jammu & Kashmir. The politicians who managed to arrive at the Srinagar airport were sent back even as the UT stayed under curfew.
Yechury spent more than six hours with his ailing comrade and former lawmaker Md Yusuf Tarigami over two days and refused state hospitality. “After I met Tarigami at his residence, I wanted to meet his doctor. The cops were impatient to take me back to the airport. I showed them a copy of the SC order that I was allowed to ascertain Tarigami’s whereabouts and medical condition,” Yechury later told HT.
Among the people he deeply admired were Mahatma Gandhi and Fidel Castro. He met the latter on his very first visit to Cuba with Basu. In their late evening meeting, a curious Castro asked Basu about India’s coal production and steel capacities. Basu fumbled at which point, Castro turned to Yechury and said: “Young man, I can understand Basu not remembering these figures. But you should have known it.” Yechury said, recollecting this story to HT, that when he went to Havana again, he carried a book of Indian statistics.
And in his sessions with younger members of his party, Yechury often taught them about Mahatma. “We tell our comrades how Mahatma Gandhi had the intelligence to identify issues that could rouse the people. It required a genius to make a historic movement out of salt and undertake a Dandi March (1930). Salt is something so essential to everybody’s life and it galvanized an entire movement. He also had a trait that was acceptable to the common people as well as the incumbent Indian capitalist class. It shows his entire purpose was to unite everybody,” Yechury told HT during the celebrations of 150th anniversary of Gandhi in 2019.
He had retired from the Rajya Sabha two years earlier, in 2017. Then House leader, the late Arun Jaitley of the BJP spoke of his contemporary fondly: “On a personal note, I have had the privilege of probably knowing him (Yechury) longer in this House and earlier than most others. We were contemporaries in the university. He went from Delhi University to Jawaharlal Nehru University.”
Jaitley added: “He always has the same enthusiasm which he had during his student days. He is ready to stand up and participate in almost every debate, making his views known. On a serious note, if I may say so, he has made an extremely valuable contribution as a Parliamentarian to almost every debate in which he has participated. There are some contributions which raise the level of the debate in the House and, unquestionably, Mr. Sitaram Yechury, in every debate that he participated, raised the level of that debate, and others who participated along with him had to really measure up to the same standard.”
But Yechury was not the same after he lost his son, Asish Yechury, to Covid-19, in 2021. He is survived by his wife Seema Chishti, a journalist and editor, daughter Akhila and son Daanish.
His passing may well mark the end of an era for the communists.
“Democratic socialism has lost its most ardent champion and secularism its most passionate voice. To a friend of friends with a heart of gold I offer farewell in utter and disconsolate grief,” former diplomat and governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi said.