Who is Sitaram Yechury? He is certainly a Communist and has been one since his student days in the early 1970s. He is the new General Secretary of a depleted, almost wasted Communist Party of India Marxist, taking over from his contemporary and comrade, Prakash Karat.
What is he like? Is he a character out of an old Cold War movie: sinister, humourless, self-important, an authoritarian commissar? Or is he a regular guy, but different? He went to St Stephen’s in New Delhi, which is what regular guys did back then.
But then he moved to Jawaharlal Nehru University, became a promising Students Federation of India leader, worked whole time with the CPI(M) and continued doing so for the next 40 plus years.
He moved up the hierarchy to the Central Committee and Politburo and is now the CPI(M) boss as its General Secretary. He has lived and worked out of New Delhi, travelled extensively and interacted regularly as the foreign affairs man for the CPI(M).
Approachable, affable and adept, Sitaram Yechury is tasked with the greatest challenge that the CPI(M) has faced since 1964, when it set itself up as a new party. The party and what it stands for – the rights of the working class, small peasants, landless labourers, and the vast army of daily wage labour – is in crisis.
After it spectacularly lost the 2011 elections in West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress ending a 34-year run in government and simultaneously lost Kerala to the Congress, the CPI(M) is down to running one tiny state, Tripura in the north east.
Its relevance and credibility are in decline and as an alternative it has few allies. The CPI(M) is nevertheless, the alternative, believes Sitaram Yechury. It stands for a secular polity. It stands for pro-poor programmes and policies that restrain and restrict reckless globalisation and liberalisation that increases poverty by depressing wages and denying social security benefits. It is the flag bearer of the “future.” His priority is “to strengthen unity of Left and democratic forces” in India.
This will require Yechury to restart the work of crafting alliances with the unstable mosaic of secular and democratic regional parties that are ever shifting allegiances and enmities. Yechury will have to steer the CPI(M) internal debate on economic policies and programmes, especially industrialisation and its relationship to the small land owner and the agricultural labourer who would be displaced. This is a debate that has never been satisfactorily concluded within the CPI(M) after the fiasco of Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal.
In his acceptance speech, Yechury described it in Marxian jargon as building a future for human civilisation through socialism as “the alternative to the crisis in capitalism.” It will mean figuring out the CPI(M) strategy on the land bill, where confrontation is escalating between Narendra Modi and Sonia-Rahul Gandhi. It will mean presenting the party’s case on Foreign Direct Investment and the social security programmes that the BJP government is officially tweaking but effectively dismantling.
Yechury will have to raise and answer the big question that has haunted the CPI(M) for decades; is the BJP the bigger enemy or are the BJP and the Congress equally evil?
The CPI(M) needs to recover lost ground in West Bengal, regain Kerala and spread itself across the country. Yechury is fully conscious of the almost insuperable challenge he faces in leading the dwindling party and reviving its fortune.
The problem is that the CPI(M) has to be prepared to follow him and his team of comparatively young leaders.
(Based in Kolkata, Shikha Mukherjee is a senior journalist and columnist writing on politics and development issues.)
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