SITARAM YECHURY CHOSE to depart at the most inopportune moment, not just for the CPI(M) but for all secular political forces in India. The BJP is on the back foot and the unity of opposition forces is important to take the project ―to unseat the saffron party―to its logical conclusion. Yechury, whose role in forging such an understanding has been hailed by everyone, would be sorely missed.
Yechury came to the limelight during the emergency days. It did not take long before he caught the attention of veteran leaders like E.M.S. Namboodiripad and P. Sundarayya. He was mentored to be an ideologue and he gave a superlative performance at the 14th congress of the CPI(M) (Madras, 1992), while presenting the document on ideological questions that had cropped up after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The CPI(M)’s worldview till then was based on the ideological resolution adopted at the Burdwan plenum in 1968. But it was rudely shaken by new global developments. The revised document was critical about the simplistic notions of the imminent collapse of capitalism and the linear growth of socialism. It underlined that the inevitable transition to socialism will be a much more complex and protracted process. This resolution, along with additions made at the 20th congress (Kozhikode, 2012), once again moved by Yechury, provided ideological clarity to the party and prevented dissensions.
Yechury was instrumental in taking forward the party line on the new industrial policy. For example, West Bengal desperately wanted to save itself from the crisis of deindustrialisation. While the rethinking on the issue was supported by the party’s veteran leadership, it was Yechury who took it forward. He coined a new term at the 18th congress (Delhi, 2005) called “engagement (joining issues)”. He argued that revolutionary forces needed to engage with existing world realities in order to change the correlation of forces in favour of socialism.
The pursuit of industrialisation in West Bengal, however, came to grief over land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur. The industrialisation programme was unavoidable, but the affected people should have been taken into confidence. Of course, there are many other factors responsible for the collapse of the left in West Bengal, but the land acquisition was the trigger.
The experience in Kerala has been dramatically different. While stepping up infrastructure investment, the welfare and social security of ordinary people needed to be steadily enhanced. It was resolved through an annuity model off-budget borrowing with a special purpose vehicle (SPV). However, the BJP-led Central government scuttled the process by retrospectively reducing from the current normal borrowing of the state government even the sums borrowed by the SPVs, pushing Kerala into an unprecedented fiscal crisis. Greater co-ordinated action between parties and states that stand by co-operative federalism is urgently required to take forward the progressive development project in Kerala. Yechury was an important contributor to the CPI(M)’s detailed position paper on the issue, “On Restructuring Centre-State Relations”(2008).
The left in India is facing its most challenging period in history. Both its parliamentary representation and mass mobilisation strength have ebbed. With his high social acceptability and sharp negotiating skills, Yechury had given the left much larger visibility than what was warranted by its present strength.
Isaac, a former finance minister of Kerala, is a central committee member of the CPI(M)