End of an era” may be a cliché, but at times, it’s the most appropriate phrase. The passing of V S Achuthanandan at 101 is such a moment.
V S defined communist politics for about eight decades. He was the last survivor of the 32 leaders who walked out of the stormy national council meeting of the undivided CPI in 1964 to form the CPM. But it is not just the years that he lived through or the epochs that he witnessed or participated in — India’s struggle for Independence, the Punnapra-Vayalar revolt of 1946 that paved the way for Kerala to join the Indian Union, the split in the Communist Party in 1964, the fight against the Emergency in 1975 or the country’s tectonic shift from a planned economy to a free market in 1991 — that defined him. Comrade V S was the last living link to an Indian politics shaped by workers’ and peasants’ movements, and the idea that mass struggle could be a vehicle for social change.
As I write this on a rainy day in New Delhi, I can’t help but notice the visuals being beamed live from Thiruvananthapuram: Even school children could be seen milling around the AKG Centre to catch a glimpse of the departed leader. I can’t help but think that even their grandfathers might not have been born when V S took up the red flag, while toiling as a tailor or lifting bales in a coir factory to earn his daily bread. Little wonder, then, that he chose to name his autobiography Life is a Struggle. As the news of his demise came in, there was a common thread in tributes, ranging from Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to the grassroots worker: V S proved that life and struggle are not two different things.
What makes Comrade V S a darling of the masses? It has as much to do with his commitment to the cause he believed in as with his passion. In the ever-changing world of realpolitik, V S chose to be a man of the party organisation for decades. One of the State Committee members of the undivided CPI that came to power in 1957 in Kerala, V S became a minister for the first time — Chief Minister to be precise — at the age of 82 in 2006. There were only two pillars in his world — the party and the people.
As CM, the biggest allegation against V S was that he behaved more like the Opposition leader. The jibe was about the mass agitations he led — such as against encroachment in the tourist paradise of Munnar by powerful vested interests or the fast he underwent demanding a ban on the deadly pesticide endosulfan. What his opponents failed to grasp — and what the masses instinctively grasped — was that he was a man fighting the system, not the Opposition. It is precisely this conviction that made him an unlikely champion of the free software movement.
His uncompromising stand on core issues of corruption, the environment and violence against women earned him a few foes but his popularity skyrocketed. As CM, he once famously refused to present an award to a then-star of Malayalam cinema who was battling charges of sexual harassment. That was V S. Setbacks only emboldened him, and he lived to fight another day.
It remains a topic of academic interest how a dyed-in-the-wool party organisation man like V S became, overnight, a wildly popular mass leader in the 1990s. He was the biggest crowd-puller I have seen. His speeches, replete with sarcasm, drew in people of all persuasions. Imitating his speeches — that style of stressing a syllable here or pausing in the middle of a wisecrack there — became a subculture in school/college festivals, movies and TV shows.
In his personal life, V S inculcated the same discipline as he did in the party as its long-standing state secretary. V S was not given to indulgences. In that, he leaves another model for India’s youth to follow: Life is about discipline, courage and commitment. More importantly, he redefined youth when questions were raised about his fitness to be CM. Comrade V S demolished the sceptics by reciting a verse:
Your age is not the grey or black/That rests upon your crown/But in the fire that burns your spirit/And a head that never bows down to tyranny.
A few days ago, I was at the hospital where the dear comrade was admitted. His son, V A Arun, said: “The fighter that he is, it won’t be easy for death to conquer him.”
V S will live on. Lal Salam, comrade.
The writer is leader of CPI(M) in Rajya Sabha
