THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: “I’ve no other option, but to fight,” Satheesan Pacheni told TNIE when he came to Thiruvananthapuram to cast his vote in the Congress presidential election on October 17. And those words summed up the quintessential spirit of the man.
A fighter to the core, Pacheni shot into the limelight after taking on the state’s most celebrated fighter V S Achuthanandan in the 2001 assembly election and lost by a slender margin from the CPM citadel, Malampuzha.
Pacheni, 54, passed away in Kannur on Thursday. He was admitted to a hospital at Chala on October 19 after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage. Doctors conducted an emergency surgery, but condition deteriorated steadily and he was declared dead on Friday morning. The funeral will be held at Payyambalam at 11.30 am on Friday. Pacheni is survived by wife Reena, children Jawahar and Sania.
The soft spoken but articulate leader’s death is a huge loss for Congress, especially in his home district Kannur. His contribution in carving out an identity for the party in the CPM stronghold is indeliable. Curiously, Pacheni comes from a hardcore Communist family. When Kannur Congress Bhavan, the district headquarters of the party, was inaugurated by Rahul Gandhi last year, it bore the distinct mark of Pacheni’s efforts. He sold his house for Rs 38 lakh to fund the construction of the office.
Attracted to the Congress after listening to A K Antony’s Guwahati speech at the AICC session in 1978, Pacheni joined its student wing. He had the rare distinction of not growing via the Youth Congress after his stint with the KSU, as he was directly promoted as KPCC secretary.
He remained a staunch ‘A’ group loyalist till 2016 when he joined hands with Ramesh Chennithala and became part of the ‘I’ camp. Soon after, he was made the Kannur DCC president. When asked about what led him to switch sides, he quipped, “Time is running out. It’s nothing, but the survival of the fittest”.
While Pacheni was simple in his approach towards life and the politics he stood for, of late he was a wounded soul. He was a tad bit disappointed that despite contesting six times, including in the Lok Sabha poll against CPM’s M B Rajesh, luck had always eluded him. When his own colleagues hurt him by addressing him as an unlucky leader, Pacheni camouflaged it with a wry smile.
Senior Congress leader K Muraleedharan recalled that Pacheni was disappointed with the outcome in the last two assembly elections in which he lost from Kannur. “His exit from the role of Kannur DCC president had also cast a pall of gloom as he wanted to see the inauguration of the Congress Bhavan happening under his tenure,” Muraleedharan said.
When K Sudhakaran took over the reins of the Congress in Kerala, it was decided that failed candidates in the assembly election and previous DCC presidents should not be considered in organisational revamping. This came as another big shock for Pacheni. Still, he silently went about his work with no complaints, playing a stellar role when Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra reached Kannur.