Sitaram Yechury: Communist Dealmaker Who Bridged Ideology and Pragmatism

Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—(CPI (M)—and the man who spent the past decade trying to usher his antiquated organisation into the 21st century, died on Thursday, September 12. He was 72 years old.  

Obituaries of communist leaders around the world describe their subjects as firebrands, fighting uncompromising battles with the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state. Yet in India now popular communist leaders’ obituaries describe their subjects as “pragmatic” or “practical”. 

Yechury was pragmatic. He realised that 20th century communist dogmas could not find solutions to the problems of the 21st and wanted to do something about it. Yechury will be remembered not only for his politics, but his ability to reach across the aisle, to disagree without being disagreeable and be fair while describing the actions of an adversary.  

The Iconic Photograph with Indira Gandhi 

His most enduring image will be that of a 20-something Yechury standing beside then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and reading out a charter of demands including one seeking her resignation as chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The year was 1977 and Yechury was a fiery students’ union leader who had fought the Emergency's excesses and had been in jail briefly in 1975. 

Four decades later, in an interview, Yechury described the episode saying: “As I was reading the litany of epithets against her, she had a smile on her face. Then she took the memorandum and walked away. And then while walking away she abused her associates saying: ‘You don’t know how to handle protests. You should have invited all of them into the lawn’.” 

Rising Red Star  

Yechury became a member of the CPI (M)’s central committee when he was 32 years old, a tall order for a party that was otherwise quite stuck up about age. Trained by the master coalition-stitcher Harkishan Singh Surjeet, he was one of the leading faces of the United Front coalitions that sought to keep Congress out of power in the 1990s. 

In 1996, Yechury, along with Prakash Karat, fought against the move to make former West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu prime minister in a Janata Dal-led government, and succeeded. Basu would later go on to call the decision “a historic blunder”.  

In the elections at the end of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s term, Yechury played a critical role in drafting the common minimum programme that helped form the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) to which Left parties extended outside support. In 2005, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal.  

The same year, then PM Manmohan Singh met then President of the US George W Bush to announce the civil nuclear cooperation deal, also called the India-US nuclear deal. Left parties were fervently opposed to this deal with America, which to them was an “imperialist power”.  

Yechury, however, was able to see the nuances. Author Sanjay Baru, in his book The Accidental Prime Minister, says Yechury placed before Parliament all that his party wanted before it let the nuclear deal go through. The Manmohan Singh government apparently satisfied all demands, but later Prakash Karat refused to continue supporting the UPA because he felt supporting a Congress-led government tie up with the US violated the communist party’s idea to have an “independent foreign policy”. Baru says in his book that Yechury was “displeased and helpless”.  

Leading a Losing Cause  

The withdrawal of support to UPA did not hurt the Congress as it survived the subsequent no-confidence motion. But for the CPI (M), it was the last time it had a powerful voice within the central government.  

In the years that followed, CPI (M) lost election after election beginning with the loss of West Bengal in 2011. The only state where the party has managed to hold considerable sway is Kerala. It fell to Yechury to reinvigorate the party when he became its general secretary in 2015. A cause in which he did not have much success. At the conclusion of the 2024 elections, his party had four seats in the Lok Sabha, and a vote share of 1.76%.  

Losing a Loved One  

Repeated electoral losses did not dampen Yechury’s spirit but a loss that shook him was the death of his son Ashish of Covid-19 in 2021 at the age of 34. Talking about how he dealt with his grief three years later, Yechury said, “I don’t know what to do. It’s a sad thing, there is a degree of denial. That continues.” He said he keeps busy so that he is not overcome by grief.  

And busy he was, taking on the general secretary mantle for the third time in 2022. Over the past few years, he came closer to the Congress party, was instrumental in keeping the INDIA coalition intact and emerged as an adviser to Rahul Gandhi. An Indian Express report claims that Congress leader Jairam Ramesh had once called him a “two-in-one” general secretary, and said: “He is general secretary of the CPI (M) and the general secretary of the Congress also. And sometimes…his influence in the Congress is more than in the CPI (M).” 

Yechury’s life was driven by the causes of his party. His finances were entirely left to his wife Seema Chisti. Yechury had said in an interview that his wife financially sustains him considering a portion of his Rajya Sabha salary went to the party fund.  

Never mind his pragmatism, Yechury never downplayed the communist cause. He wanted his party to practise the politics that made sense in a country that had opened up to the world and was run on the aspirations of a burgeoning middle class. Yechury not only quoted Leninist theory but lived by the Leninist thought: “The concrete analysis of the concrete situation is not an opposite of ‘pure’ theory, but—on the contrary—it is the culmination of genuine theory, its consummation.”