Hyderabad: Telangana chief minister A Revanth Reddy and Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) working president K T Rama Rao (KTR) to share the stage at a memorial meeting honouring the late Sitaram Yechury, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who recently passed away due to ill health.
The event is scheduled for September 21 at the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram in Baglingampally, Hyderabad, starting at 11 AM.
CPI(M) state secretary Tammineni Veerabhadram confirmed the news further informing that other notable attendees will include B V Raghavulu, a member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau, and K Narayana, the state secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI).
Yechury’s demise
Yechury passed away on September 12 after a prolonged battle with a severe lung infection. He was 72 years old and had been a significant figure in Indian politics for decades, known for his commitment to Marxist ideology and his role in coalition-building among leftist parties.
Yechury is survived by his wife Seema Chishti, an editor with news portal The Wire and three children — two sons and a daughter. One of his sons Ashish Yechury passed away due to Covid in 2021. He was earlier married to Indrani Mazumdar.
Condolences from across the political spectrum poured in, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi remembering the comrade as a “leading light of the Left” and Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi calling him “a protector of the idea of India”.
Called ‘Sita’ by his friends, Yechury, the fifth general secretary of the CPI-M who took over the reins of the party in 2015 from party hardliner Prakash Karat when Left fortunes were on the decline, was also hailed as an effective parliamentarian, a pillar of the party and an “unrepentant Marxist” with a pragmatic streak.
A soft spoken and popular leader who had friends across the political spectrum, Yechury was also a Rajya Sabha MP for 12 years from 2005.
Key man behind INDIA alliance
Yechury’s family has donated his body to AIIMS for teaching and research purposes, the hospital said in a statement.
A polyglot and prolific writer, Yechury was known for his skills at alliance building and was also one of the main building forces of the INDIA bloc, the opposition’s alliance against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
In one of his last video messages, Yechury had paid tributes to former West Bengal chief minister and CPI-M veteran Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. In a video message recorded from the hospital on August 22, he had said it was his loss that he was not able to physically attend this memorial meeting and pay homage to him.
“It’s most unfortunate that I had to connect from AIIMS to convey my feelings, emotions & revolutionary Lal Salaam to Buddho da,” he had said.
Yechury thrived on the challenges of coalition politics and in this way, he was more akin to his mentor, the late party leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet.
While Surjeet was a key player in the coalition era during the National Front government of VP Singh – formed in 1989 – and the United Front government of 1996-97, both supported from outside by the CPI-M, Yechury was the go to man during the UPA rule when Manmohan Singh was the prime minister, especially during its first five-year term from 2004.
Yechury, who was born in Chennai and studied at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College and Jawaharlal Nehru University, was a trusted ally of Sonia Gandhi, who was the United Progressive Alliance chairperson.
He was the first non-Congress leader Gandhi called after she met then-president APJ Abdul Kalam in 2004 when she turned down the post of prime minister and rallied behind Singh.
Earlier, Yechury worked with Congress leader P Chidambaram to draft the common minimum programme for the United Front government in 1996-97.
It was an equation that survived the shock withdrawal of support by the Left to the UPA in 2008 over the Indo-US nuclear deal.
Yechury later said the Left should not have withdrawn support on the nuclear deal but should have pulled out on issues like price rise as the people could not be mobilised on the nuke issue in the 2009 general elections.
His rise in the party was swift. In 1985, he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPI-M and to the Politburo in 1992 at the age of 40 and then party chief in 2015. He was one of the youngest members of the Politburo.
Born in a Telugu-speaking family in Chennai on August 12, 1952, Yechury’s father Sarveswara Somayajula Yechury was an engineer in the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation. His mother Kalpakam Yechury was a government officer.
(With excerpts from PTI)
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