A mop of frizzy hair that placed him in a permanent Seventies, a boyish face that seemed to be built for laughter, eyes that were always smiling (though of late touched by sadness), a manner that was the very definition of amiable, speech that was erudite but easy, persuasive rather than offensive, smooth but always guided by conviction.
Of all the talk of revolution that swirled around, he must have been the gentlest apostle. Which is why everyone, even the fiercest antagonists, will recall Sitaram Yechury, the person, as much as what he stood for. With fondness and not a trace of rancour.
That’s what places him in a rare category among politicians—he was one of those who could converse with anyone, everyone, as a friend. Ideology defined him, but did not exhaust his inventory. An endangered tribe these days, it has lost one of its best, and not at the best of times. One would have to say Comrade Yechury, at 72, is gone too soon.
Most appraisals of his career will read Yechury in terms of his well-known trajectory as a Communist frontman, starting from his days as a student leader during a definitive era at Jawaharlal Nehru University and analyse whether that promise was filled out or not in terms of building the Left movement in India. Only few realise what a talent India has been deprived of—in universalist terms.
A political life that was oath-bound to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) meant that its puritanical aloofness in New Delhi always applied to him—and always kept him out of government. In fact, strangely for a politician, the question never seemed to even arise. The loss was perhaps India’s as much as the Left’s.
Judge by what he managed at the highest levels, even as a faceless, behind-the-scenes interlocutor. The Manmohan Singh government’s final nuclear deal with the US—with conditions favourable to India—was a document that bore the stamp of an exhaustive, point-by-point, clause-by-clause, process of critique and emendation conducted by Yechury’s team. Imagine a deal with capitalist America being rewritten by a Communist. Ironic that his party finally withdrew support to the UPA on that very deal.
Around those same days, his mediation was accepted, and bore fruit, within Nepal’s polity and vis-a-vis its India relations, at a particularly dark time in its history.
Sitaram Yechury: A leader’s conversations with history
His was also the face that could, almost magically, open doors in Kashmir, even that of the most staunch separatist leaders. The qualified success of the all-party delegation that sought to rebuild what seemed to be irreparably broken bridges after the popular uprising of 2010 owed to him—a historic experiment that India, sadly, did not pursue.
What such a talent could have managed in government will remain a big what-if of history. Even in situations where all avenues for dialogue seem to be exhausted, it’s the Left ideologue with the cherubic face who could always make things talk. Almost always. Six years after the 2010 mission, during a repeat attempt, it was Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s closed door in his face that symbolised how deep the alienation in the Valley was—as if to say, if Comrade Yechury couldn’t do it, it simply can’t be done.
The student leader who read out a charter of demands to Indira Gandhi in 1977—captured in an iconic photograph—was to become a guide and mentor to her grandson decades later. And move with the times, happily submitting himself to ribbing by young video podcasters. But now, with the pain of a son’s death wearing him down, he has left a lot of conversations with the times unfinished.
