Thousands of people gathered to pay their last tribute to comrade Sitaram Yechury at the headquarters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in New Delhi on September 14. General Secretary of the CPI(M), Yechury passed away on Thursday, September 12 in a hospital in the city due to prolonged illness.
Thousands of people marched from the CPI (M) headquarters accompanying Sitaram’s body along the way to the hospital where he died, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). His body was donated to AIIMS by Sitaram’s family members to be used for medical research.
Sitaram Yechury was a Marxist with an undying faith in Leninist organizing principles. Throughout his life he adhered to the principles of equality and socialism and worked to promote the idea that only socialism can liberate the masses from the economic misery which capitalism has subjected them to.
A leading public intellectual who regularly wrote on current and theoretical issues pertinent to Marxist politics, Sitaram has produced several works on secularism, finance capital, imperialism, and public policy.
Sitaram was one of the first public intellectuals in India to produce a systemic analysis of the political right’s ideological positions in the country which was growing in strength in the early 1990s. His thorough examination of the ideological fundamentals of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of the ruling Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), became a source of further studies on the subject and raised people’s consciousness regarding the dangers of Hindutva.
Sitaram believed in CPI (M) taking a proactive and leading role against sectarianism and politics based on religious hatred as pursued by the BJP. He did not think the party’s weakened electoral performance should prevent it from initiating the movement. He devised the policy of making alliances with all secular forces irrespective of party’s ideological disagreements with them and played a crucial role in reducing BJP to a minority in the parliament in the last general elections held earlier this year.
The Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) led by Congress became a reality mostly thanks to the efforts made by Yechury and others and this alliance was able to defeat BJP in key states. This has led to the emergence of a stronger opposition, better equipped to check the arbitrary rule of prime minister Narendra Modi which he has been practicing for a decade now.
A committed practitioner of internationalism
A true practitioner of internationalism and anti-imperialism, Sitaram was his party’s face in many international events and forums. He attended those events primarily to extend his party’s solidarity with the people’s movement all across the world.
One of his last major public appearances was attending a rally in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom against the Israeli occupation and its ongoing genocidal war in Gaza.
— CPI (M) (@cpimspeak) June 1, 2024
Sitaram adhered to the idea that socialism must be developed in each country according to that country’s concrete situation, defending the experiments done by ruling communist and socialist parties in countries such as China. He looked towards China as a leading example of how socialism can bring an end to people’s misery and poverty and create a better system for all.
When he was the head of the party’s international division he organized a seminar on Contemporary World Situation and Validity of Marxism in 1993 in Kolkata in order to find a common strategy for the left across the world to deal with the new global situation.
Sitaram was an ardent critic of the new Cold War tactics used by the US against China and other countries opposed to its hegemonic presence in global politics. He was critical to India joining the US bandwagon and wanted his country to remain true to its anti-colonial legacy and position of non-alignment.
Sitaram became a member of the left wing Student Federation of India (SFI) during his days at Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) at a time when the world was witnessing the Vietnamese people’s strong resistance to US imperialism and while Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attempted to impose authoritarian rule at home. He was arrested during the emergency and later was elected president of the JNU student union.
Sitaram joined CPI(M) while still a student in the 1970s and was later elected to the party’s Central Committee in 1982. He became a member of CPI (M) Polit Bureau in 1992 at the age of 40. He was elected the general secretary of the party in 2015 and remained so till the time of his death.
Sitaram contributed immensely in shaping the party’s political line in the 1990s when the left movements across the world were dealing with the fall of the Soviet Union on the one side and rise of finance capital in the form of neoliberal globalization on the other. Remembering his contributions, Prakash Karat, Sitaram’s colleague in the CPI (M) PB and its former general secretary wrote in People’s Democracy that “Sitaram with his grasp of the workings of international finance capital and neo-liberal capitalism, played a key role in updating” the crucial party documents such as the party program at the time.
Sitaram aligned with the idea that it was imminent for the left movements to devise necessary changes in their strategies to respond to changes in the global situation in order to remain relevant.
Sitaram was elected as the member of the Rajya Sabha, upper house of India’s Parliament for two terms between 2005 and 2017 where he represented the left’s agenda in debates on various legislations and policy matters.
He was also the editor of party’s publications People’s Democracy and its research journal Marxist published quarterly.
