Sitaram Yechury.
Credit: PTI File Photo
New Delhi: Confronting Hindutva was always high on Sitaram Yechury’s agenda and a publishing house where he was one of the founding-directors is now planning to bring out a collection of his writings on communalism, including the 1993 booklet ‘What is This Hindu Rashtra?’
The LeftWord Books, founded in 1999, wanted him to write a fuller version of the booklet and Yechury had been talking to them about it to bring out a book that updates it beyond 1993 to include the rise of Narendra Modi and the BJP.
However, Yechury’s death on September 12 put a spanner on the plans.
“Both Vijay Prashad and I had spoken to Yechury about updating this influential essay, which helped people understand the Hindutva project when there was very little literature about it,” LeftWord Managing Editor Sudhanva Deshpande told DH.
He said both Prashad, editor of LeftWord Books, and him used to ask Yechury to work on a book on communalism but the former CPI(M) General Secretary used to cite his busy schedule.
“I used to jokingly tell him he may get some time after he relinquishes his post. Yechury used to laugh and then say that he would then get all the time he would need to write the book,” Deshpande said.
“We had hoped to encourage him to get the project done in 2025, after the conclusion of his final term as General Secretary of the CPI(M), but alas, that book will not be published. Instead, we will bring out a collection of his writings on communalism, which would have been the anchor of the book that he had planned,” Prashad and Deshpande wrote in a blog.
As his schedule clashed with the idea of a new book, the publishers then decided that they would compile his articles on communalism along with the 1993 essay and an introduction from him. They now plan to launch the book at the CPI(M)’s Party Congress scheduled next year.
Yechury was one of the founding directors of The LeftWord Books and was part of the Editorial Advisory Board along with Prakash Karat and Prabhat Patnaik among others. However when he became a Rajya Sabha MP, he relinquished the post of being the Director in The LeftWord Books.
“Sadly for us, he stepped down from being a director of the company after he became a member of parliament. This was because he himself had raised the issue of conflict of interest when parliamentarians owned or led private companies. This was particularly galling, he argued, if they also wormed their way into parliamentary committees that oversaw the sectors that overlapped with their business interests,” Prashad and Desphande wrote.
"Even though Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns the LeftWord imprint, was minuscule as compared to giant conglomerates that operated across, say, aviation, liquor, media, and sports, it was for him a matter of principle that as a parliamentarian he should not be seen as having private business interests, even though he had never been paid by the company nor derived any pecuniary advantage from it,” they added.