He was one of those few people CPM Leaders who did not analyse ideologically much about who the party should ally with CongressThose who were earlier considered the main opponents of the communists will now compete against them BJP When this party became the ruling party under the leadership of Vajpayee.
During the 2024 election campaign, he insisted that the Modi-led BJP must be challenged in state-by-state contests through alliances. An analysis partly confirmed by the results. Interestingly, the CPM’s ideological purists still do not formally accept the party’s alliance with the Congress, even if the CPM is part of it India Block,
As a student politician, Yechury had forced Indira Gandhi to step down as vice-chancellor of JNU, making his later pragmatism even more evident. His distancing himself from the Naxalites in the 1970s, because that branch of Marxist politics declared loyalty to the Chinese Communists, was another sign of his pragmatic political understanding. As he said in 2014, when Modi first took office: “Conditions have changed, so our analysis and alignment will change accordingly”.
If some assessments of his pragmatism compare him with another pragmatic Communist, Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who was a shrewd coalition builder, it must be noted that the difference in the success rate of the two can be explained mainly by the fact that the CPM was in a more politically dominant position during Surjeet’s heyday.
Yechury’s easygoing nature was not a later-day political change. Even as a student activist he was not known for being overbearing or making loud statements. Engaging in debate was his style, and delivering witty one-liners was his eloquence. Many politicians, including communists, are loudmouths. Yechury never was. Another characteristic was that unlike many fellow Marxists, he avoided jargon. Again, unlike doctrinaire Marxists, he was always interested not just in class but also in social groups and religion. He knew the latter were valuable in understanding Indian society.
Telugu was his mother tongue. In party forums and meetings, he preferred English as he felt political formulation was easier for him in that language. But he delivered public speeches in Hindi. During his two-term tenure in the Rajya Sabha from Bengal, he tried to speak in Bengali during his interactions with Bengali journalists.
Born into a Telugu Brahmin family, Yechury refused to wear the sacred thread and recite shlokas. He said he was the first communist in his family. But he never underestimated the philosophical debates contained in ancient religious texts. An open mind later helped him debate with the Hindu right wing.
Those who knew him well said one of Yechury’s special qualities as a politician was that he was more interested in finding commonalities than differences between parties and groups. These qualities served him well in Parliament, where his candour stood out even when the general quality of parliamentary interventions was poor. When he finished his Rajya Sabha term in 2017, tributes from Samajwadi Party MP Ram Gopal Yadav poured in. But he was not the only MP who felt the House would miss Yechury.
Of course, as the electoral penetration of the Left declined, the national political importance of CPM leaders, including Yechury, also declined. The most crucial period was between 2004 and 2008 – from the formation of UPA-1 to the withdrawal of support by the CPM. Manmohan SinghTargeted the US government over the India-US nuclear deal.
It is rare for Indian politicians, including communists, to introspect publicly. But Yechury proved to be an exception when, after UPA-2 came to power, he admitted that his party had not been able to make its stand on the nuclear deal clear to voters who handed the Congress-led coalition a healthy victory. He was perhaps the only politburo member to do so.
The defeat at the hands of TMC in Bengal was a blow to the CPM and its leaders from which they have not been able to recover. Yechury and other CPM leaders have rarely been in the national spotlight.
But his international communist connections made him very relevant when in 2009 the UPA government sought his help to contact Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda, who later became the Prime Minister.
Yechury’s last public message came on the day he was shifted from the ICU to a normal bed at AIIMS in Delhi. The recorded message was a tribute to another communist stalwart, former Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who died recently.
Yechury was grappling with a deep personal tragedy when he fell ill. He lost his son Ashish to Covid in 2021. Those close to him say he was never the same after that. The father in him was lost. But it reflects his abilities as a politician that the pragmatic communist in him kept moving forward.
