4 min readJul 24, 2025 05:25 PM IST
First published on: Jul 24, 2025 at 05:25 PM IST
Like cartoonists outside Kerala, the national Opposition missed V S Achuthanandan. From Rahul Gandhi to Akhilesh Yadav and M K Stalin to Omar Abdullah, not a single player from the multiple parties that seek to build a country-wide alternative was present at his funeral. More than the 101-year-old himself, people’s response to his demise could have set them thinking. In an entirely non-choreographed public gesture, grieving men, women and children waited for hours in pouring rain to get a last glimpse of the hearse.
Had V S been an unlikely Delhi presence like the late Congress party veteran K Kamaraj in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cartoonists outside his home state would have taken to him. Kerala’s cartoonists loved V S. He looked, moved, spoke, and gesticulated with a stylised flair that verged on the comic. You only had to complete the caricature. He didn’t seem to mind at all. He was happy to pose on occasion for dozens of cartoonists who sat around and sketched. He knew it was vital to be in cartoons as much as in newspaper headlines and later on TV screens and social media.
Early on in his public life, under medical advice, he shed weight to become the familiar shoulders-raised, ramrod straight figure with not an ounce of flab. White dhoti, white kurta, black rimmed glasses and a wrist watch. He managed to defy age and look mostly the same through some five decades in public life out of which he was in power as CM for a mere five years. Mostly in Opposition with no immediate prospect of office, he never lost public attention through these distracting times. For six long years before he died on July 21, V S was out of the news and at his funeral four- and five-year-olds were seen hoisted on parental shoulders. He had become a bedside story and the kids wanted to see their hero.
This goes against the palpable anxiety of younger politicians about getting out of sight, out of mind. If you are in office for less than one-tenth of your extra-long political life, how do you remain so visible, so popular and so effective a campaigner in poll after poll? Those were decades when Kerala experimented with politics more than most other states. Coalitions rose and fell every once in a while, to eventually settle down to a neat pattern of alternating in power every five years. This comfort zone has since been breached by the incumbent two-term Left government but the basic electoral transaction remains. Parties ask for your votes, and you expect returns – sarkari freebies and welfare. Coalitions vie with each other to woo micro-segments of voters.
V S had to deliver in this kind of competitive transactional space, and he did, but on his terms with no guarantees. He would get you land if you are landless and a home if you are homeless, not as a favour or out of mercy but because he was convinced that is your right. When he fought the corrupt, what came across more than his clean image was his crusading zeal. He went after the corrupt till they were brought to book. For women’s rights, few mainstream politicians could have fought as relentlessly. When live TV came to Kerala, his activism played out in field trips cut out for televising. As sceptical about the bourgeoise courts as any doctrinaire comrade, he didn’t hesitate to build up a fine network of lawyers to advance public causes in courtrooms.
It took 25 years for the non-Congress stalwarts of the freedom movement to unseat the Congress party in 1977. And that happened after a traumatic excess like the Emergency. Now, again, when the ruling party is clearly dominant, the opposition has to be ready for a long-distance run. They should take a good look at the life of this centenarian marathoner.
ep.unny@expressindia.com
Mostly in opposition with no immediate prospect of office, he never lost public attention. (E P Unny) 
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