Sitaram Yechury was a firm believer of the Marxist ideology. But he also believed there was great virtue in being flexible and practical in politics. His rare ability to be pragmatic while being a staunch Leftist in fact set him apart as a political leader.
The pleasant natured and jovial Yechury was a popular man in the capital’s political circles. More significantly, he played an important role in national politics in the last few decades, be it in the cobbling together of anti-Congress coalition governments in the 1990’s to allying with the Congress after the Lok Sabha elections in 2004 to the making of an opposition alliance that could offer a gutsy challenge to the Narendra Modi dispensation.
In the 1990’s, Yechury was amongst the Left leaders who had an important role to play in the installation of the United Front government headed by H.D. Deve Gowda. He was amongst the authors of the Common Minimum Programme of the government. After the Deve Gowda government fell, he had a key role to play in getting I.K. Gujral sworn in as the next prime minister.
He had been a practitioner of anti-Congressism, but after the Lok Sabha elections in 2004, Yechury displayed his ability to be pragmatic and was amongst the voices in the Left bloc that spoke for extending support to the Congress to form the government. The Left parties helped the United Progressive Alliance government come into being, extending outside support to the Manmohan Singh regime. Again, like in the case of the United Front government, Yechury’s imprint was clear in the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA.
Yechury influenced a closer cooperation between the Left and the UPA regime, and the rights-based initiatives of the Manmohan Singh regime—there was a flurry of such schemes during UPA-I—are credited to the Left’s influence on the government.
The Left parties, after protracted talks with the government, withdrew support from the UPA government in 2008 over their staunch opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal. It was a time when Yechury increasingly came to be known as representing the thought in the CPI(M) that there should be collaboration with the Congress to keep the communal forces out. The other stream of thought—about not compromising with Communist ideals and maintaining opposition to the Congress—was represented by his fellow comrade Prakash Karat.
Yechury’s pragmatism found support in the Bengal unit of the party, while Karat’s line of thought was backed by the party’s unit in Kerala.
It was Yechury’s belief that being practical was the need of the hour to keep the CPI(M) relevant in the changing political times. The party had won 43 seats in the Lok Sabha in the 2004 elections, which was its best ever performance. But post-2009, when it won only 16 seats, it continued to slide electorally. Karat was the CPI(M) general secretary from 2005 to 2015, with Yechury taking over from him.
Yechury failed to stem the electoral downfall of the CPI(M) as it became a bit player in West Bengal and lost Tripura to the BJP after having held the state for 25 years. Intra-party dynamics, with the Kerala unit continuing to not be in sync with his views on contemporary politics, ensured he did not get another term in the Rajya Sabha in 2017. His proposal to ally with the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 was rejected by the party’s central committee.
However, recent years saw Yechury emerge as a key architect of the opposition alliance that took on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. It was known unofficially that he was the one who drafted many of the opposition’s joint resolutions. He had an excellent rapport with Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, and it was believed that he acted as a guide and a sounding board for the Congress leader.
Yechury was committed to the Marxist ideology. But more than that, he believed in the necessity of being flexible in politics.