A MONTH ago, none of us could ever have imagined that such a sad day would come so suddenly. Sitaram Yechury’s passing on September 12, 2024 has created a deep void not only in the CPI(M), but also in all the left, democratic and secular forces in India. This is clear from the avalanche of condolence messages, tributes, articles, memoirs and editorials that have appeared in both the mainstream media and the social media since then – most of them from his friends and comrades, but also some from his adversaries and opponents.

LONG AND CLOSE ASSOCIATION

I have had the privilege of knowing Sitaram from our SFI days. 45 years ago in 1979, the Third All India Conference of the SFI at Patna was my first conference when I got acquainted with him.

The veteran leader of the Party and CITU, B T Ranadive used to be the Party-in-charge of Maharashtra for several years. Two years after his demise in 1990, the PB gave that responsibility to its then youngest member, Sitaram Yechury. Sitaram ably carried it out for over two decades till he was elected general secretary of the CPI(M) in 2015. Along with attending state committee meetings, there was almost no district in this large state which he did not visit for some struggle, public meeting, convention or study camp. As state secretary of the Party and even before, I used to accompany him on many of these visits. That led to even more closeness. Numerous are my memories of many memorable struggles of those days. But for reasons of space, they will have to wait for some other time.

SHARP THINKER, STAUNCH FIGHTER

It is on the basis of this long and close association with Sitaram that I can say that all through his life he was an excellent embodiment of the famous SFI slogan of Study and Struggle. Karl Marx in his youth wrote the celebrated sentence, “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” As a sharp thinker and a staunch fighter, Sitaram used his entire life and all his powers not only to interpret the world and our country, but also to try and change both. And he did this, always accurately applying the compass of Marxism-Leninism, which he had tried to master, and to which he was committed to the core.

SWORN ENEMY OF IMPERIALISM

In the international sphere, the fight against imperialism was an article of faith with Sitaram. His generation grew up with the deadly US war against Vietnam, and the valiant and eventually victorious resistance of the Vietnamese people led by Ho Chi Minh and the Communists. We were inspired by the defiant building of socialist Cuba by Communists led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and the shattering martyrdom of the latter at the hands of US henchmen. We were also witness to the India-Pakistan war for the liberation of Bangladesh, during which the US threatened to send its Seventh Fleet to browbeat India. These events were accompanied by the horrendous fascist massacres of tens of thousands of Communists and democrats in Indonesia and Chile, and the hated apartheid regime in South Africa which kept Nelson Mandela and so many other heroes in jail for decades. No sensitive youth in those days could have remained immune to all these events.

Later, of course, there came the series of catastrophic wars launched by US imperialism, and supported by European imperialism, against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yugoslavia, and numerous countries in Africa. These wars collectively massacred millions of people. Even today, the imperialist-Zionist nexus continues its year-long genocide of the Palestinian people, killing tens of thousands of children, women and men. All this is apart from the unprecedented socio-economic exploitation of the world and of its environment by imperialist finance capital and neoliberalism, and its agencies like the IMF, WB, WTO, and MNCs.In both words and deeds, Sitaram fought against these evils, putting his expertise in economics to good use.

DEFENDING THE  IDEA OF INDIA

An old menace began gaining ominous strength from the early 1990s. That was the scourge of communalism led by the RSS-VHP-BJP under the garb of Hindutva. Its other inseparable ideological underpinning was the reactionary 2000-year-old text called the Manusmriti. The RSS drew inspiration from the fascist dictatorships of Germany and Italy under Hitler and Mussolini. In class terms, it was a servile slave of imperialism and neoliberalism, crony capitalism and feudalism. And, of course, it considered Communists as its mortal enemy, with valid historical reasons. These sentiments were, of course, reciprocated by the Communists.

The conspiratorial demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by the RSS-led Sangh Parivar on December 6, 1992,and the acquiescence of the then Congress regime at the Centre, was a watershed moment in the history of India. This event prompted the legendary Communist leader Jyoti Basu to directly castigate the RSS-BJP as being “barbarian”. The very next year in 1993, Sitaram wrote and N Ram of Frontline published a small but very influential pamphlet titled What is this Hindu Rashtra? In this pamphlet Sitaram mercilessly exposed and demolished the communal, casteist, and fascist arguments of the second RSS chief M S Golwalkar, which were made in his 1939 book titled We, or Our Nationhood Defined.

The die had been cast. After that there was no turning back. Sitaram spent the last 30-odd years of his life in strongly and consistently defending the Idea of India, the principle of Unity in Diversity, and the fundamental tenets of India’s Constitution, one of the main architects of which was Dr B R Ambedkar. These basic tenets were Sovereignty, Democracy, Secularism, Federalism, and Socio-economic Justice. Sitaram, and the collective leadership of the CPI(M), fought this struggle to the hilt. As he often used to say, the struggle against economic exploitation and social oppression is indivisible, and must be waged together.

BUILDING THE UPA

The growing menace of the RSS-BJP combine was underlined when it came to central power from 1998 to 2004, although not with a clear majority. The need to forge Left unity, and the unity of Left, democratic, and secular forces gained even more urgency. Under the leadership of veteran Communist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who mentored Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat and many others, the initially successful UPA-1 experiment began.

When the UPA came to power in 2004, a Common Minimum Programme (CMP) was prepared. Sitaram had a key role in framing it. It was during the UPA-1 regime that, under pressure of the Left, several pro-people measures were taken, like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Forest Rights Act (FRA), the Right to Information Act (RTI), the Food Security Act (FSA), the Right to Education Act (RTE), the partial loan waiver to the peasantry, and a partial brake on the privatisation of public sector units.

But it must not for a moment be forgotten that all this became possible not just through good intentions and individual efforts, but because the Left had a formidable combined strength of 61 MPs, and the CPI(M) on its own had 43 MPs, in the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009. The Left then had also won the three state governments of West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura.

Our independent strength is one crucial area where all of us have collectively fallen short in the recent past. Overcoming this weakness is the topmost priority for us in the years ahead.

Sitaram utilised his 12-year stint in the Rajya Sabha from 2005 to 2017 to effectively focus on the real and burning problems of all sections of the working people. The first four years were spent as part of the UPA-1 coalition, the next five in an adversarial relationship with the UPA-2, and the last three in total political opposition to the BJP-NDA regime. His excellently argued speeches in the Rajya Sabha on a wide variety of topics laid out the CPI(M) and Left line on all these issues, and they were highly appreciated even by his political opponents.

Sitaram’s and the Party’s interventions in the extra-parliamentary sphere were no less significant. I particularly remember his role in the joint peasant struggle against the Land Acquisition Ordinance in 2015, and in the united peasant-worker struggle against the three Farm Laws in 2020-21. In the first, it was he who took the lead in mobilizing most opposition parties in the Rajya Sabha against the Land Acquisition Ordinance. The combined struggle of the peasantry under the leadership of the Bhumi Adhikar Andolan (BAA) outside parliament, and the struggle within the Rajya Sabha in parliament, made the BJP regime see the writing on the wall, and Modi had to let the Land Ordinance lapse. In the iconic year-long Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) struggle against the Farm Laws, Sitaram mobilised large sections of the opposition to support the Bharat Bandhs and other SKM struggle calls. His support to the anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh struggle, the women wrestlers’ struggle, etc was also very significant.

FORGING THE INDIA BLOC

During the last year of his life in 2023-24, he was among those instrumental in forging the INDIA bloc of Left and secular parties against the BJP-NDA combine. Since one of the national meetings of the INDIA bloc was held in Mumbai in August 2023, the CPI(M) PB deputed me to attend that meeting with Sitaram. There I saw for myself his valuable interventions and also the high esteem in which he was held by all the partners of that bloc. The INDIA bloc came within striking distance of ousting the BJP-NDA from power in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024.

Many have described Sitaram’s personal qualities – erudition, accessibility, simplicity, humility, sensitivity, friendship, humour, and so on. While all that is true, it is also true that he never compromised on his core principles, and his integrity. While naturally concentrating on current challenges, Sitaram also never forgot the true aim of a Communist Party – the overthrow of feudalism and capitalism and their replacement by socialism. He challenged the ruling class slogan of ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) to capitalism, with ‘Socialism Is The Alternative’ (SITA). He used to say this with a disarming smile, since SITA was the short form of his own name! This was akin to the World Social Forum (WSF) slogan, ‘Another World is Possible’!

Sitaram often used to say that to be a good Communist, you must be a good human being. He was both. And that is his legacy that we must all strive to carry forward with determination!