Yeoman Yechury: Legend of the fall of the Left

Sitaram Yechury, senior leader of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), passed away recently, aged 72. As is their wont, much of the liberal mainstream media poured out encomia. Half of it was valid. By most accounts, Yechury was a personable politician who cut across persuasions. His wide-ranging interests, his fluency in many Indian languages, his kinship with students and paragons, his ease in and out of the many hallways of Indian politics, drew him many enthusiasts. Some of his gestures are singular in independent Indian history. In October 1977, as JNU Students’ Union president, he read the riot act, so to say, to the newly out-of-power Indira Gandhi, demanding that she resign as JNU’s Chancellor over her actions during the Emergency. She duly acceded. After his death, he desired his body be used for scientific research and willed it to AIIMS, Delhi. Another Communist leader and trade unionist, A B Bardhan, who passed away in 2016, aged 91, left behind just a few clothes and books. Those were his belongings over a lifetime. With exceptions, Leftists’ abstemiousness is storied.

For all their individual qualities – and there are several in the many avatars of the Indian Left that embody that – what stymied their appeal across India?

It’s an old query that resurfaces often. After yeoman Yechury’s demise, it hasn’t been raised enough. Liberal and Left outpourings once more steered clear of that niggle. If Yechury and comrades were so good, epitomising the concerns of the majority poor and working classes, why couldn’t they become the star of Indian politics? Why were they confined to West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura for decades, where even two of those states have almost called time on them? Weren’t Yechury and team liable for that?

When criticised over their poor presence outside their citadels, Yechury (and the wider Left) often justified that by saying that politics for them was more than about seeking power. It meant struggling to raise awareness on commoners’ issues. Yet, such a stance was afforded them due to decades helming just three states. It is baffling that urbane sophisticates such as Yechury forsook the chance to leverage the Left’s strengths and parlaying them to usher in a new type of urban politics (that the AAP crafted and bolstered in the 2010s.)

In this imagining, with the bulwark of a JNU in the heart of hyper-capitalist South Delhi, it wasn’t unthinkable and unachievable that the Left took its politics out of JNU and into the rest of the capital. To me, it’s Yechury and comrades’ fatal failing: Despite evident advantages, the huge student support they drew over many decades, they didn’t even make proper attempts to win over the citizens of the capital. It was straight up their alley, and they ceded it to the Congress and the BJP.

Under Yechury and Karat, the CPM had a good period in the mid- 2000s, they were coalition partners in the UPA. They should have gone further. But by the late-2000s, the comrades knew they were in existential trouble. The Left and (the recently deceased) ex-CM of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, knew that their prized state needed to stall out-migration, accommodate capitalism, create jobs: Left ideology had limited uses. Communist China now pushed its proletariat to State capitalism. Venezuela’s anti-American ranter, Hugo Chavez, traded most with America.

The Left elsewhere was changing, hammered by the advances of the neoliberal world. What were Indian comrades to do? Could they have become a little like New Labour in Britain? The Singur and Nandigram moments were those equivalents for the Indian Left. They were late in the game. They forced the issue, it backfired, and triggered their decline. Lovely person Yechury was a legend of that fall of the Left.