Communist doyen who transcended partisan divide, became mass leader

The late Sitaram Yechury once compared Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan VS for his millions of admirers to the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. VS, who passed away aged 101 on Monday evening in Thiruvananthapuram, was more of a state chieftain than a national leader.

- Amrith Lal

But in his battleground, the state of Kerala, he commanded widespread respect and loyalty similar to that the evoked in the communist citadel in the Caribbean.

What distinguished VS from most of his political peers is that his popularity was not restricted to the cadre base of his party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist. In the last few decades of his life, he transcended the image of a hardline commissar and transformed into a mass leader, whose popularity the CPI-M both desired and feared, which had consequences for his political career.

The last of the titans who built the Communist movement in the country-VS joined the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1940 at the age of 17 - he was representative of a generation of preIndependence politicians, incor ruptible, disciplined, frugal in needs, and fiercely committed to the values and dreams that inspired him to join politics. In practical terms, his politics and worldview were provincial, but it was underwritten by a solidarity with the poor and the underprivileged. The big ideological debates, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, hardly challenged his convictions.

VS lost both his parents by the time he turned 12 and dropped out of school early. Born in an Ezhava (an OBC community) family, he joined the lower rungs of the labour force in Alappuzha, then an industrial town in the Travancore state in the late 1930s, and simultaneously, the CPI which was organising workers in coir factories, port and the large paddy fields in Kuttanad, the hinterland of Alappuzha. He came under the tutelage of P Krishna Pillai, the "comrade" who built the base for a powerful Communist movement across the different regions that later came to constitute Kerala in the 1930s and 40s. VS was arrested and tortured in the aftermath of the 1946 Punnapra-Vayalar uprising of peasants and workers, which was ruthlessly crushed by the Travancore state.