The INDIA bloc on Saturday met for the first time without its cementing force, Sitaram Yechury, publicly conceding it had none within its ranks to take on his role of trouble-shooter in crunch situations that are part and parcel of coalitions.

Almost every party leader who spoke at the memorial meeting organised by the CPM acknowledged that Yechury’s coalition management skills would be sorely missed.

“The CPM will find a new general secretary, but we will not find another Sitaram Yechury,” RJD member Manoj Jha said, summing up the despondency in the Opposition camp since the Marxist leader’s death on September 12.

In deference to Yechury’s belief in the importance of working with secular democratic forces to keep communal parties at bay, the CPM took a step back and allowed the INDIA bloc to take centre-stage at the gathering.

Former CPM general secretary Prakash Karat found his voice breaking as he spoke about his comrade-in-arms of five decades. Karat — who had his disagreements with Yechury on widely debated issues within the CPM, particularly its relationship with the Congress — said his passing was a blow not just to the party but to secular democratic forces across the country.

National Conference leader and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah, who had left the campaign trail in the Union Territory to fly to Delhi, underscored Yechury’s importance to India’s fight for constitutional values.

He recalled how Yechury tried to keep the Opposition parties together, and added that no key decision was taken in the INDIA bloc without consulting him.

But he had one grouse. “When we wanted to make the (then) chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, the Prime Minister of India, this group did not agree.”

This appeared an allusion to Yechury and Karat, both of whom were part of the group within the CPM that had opposed Basu’s being made Prime Minister in 1996 as the consensus candidate of the United Front. Basu later described his party’s decision to reject the offer as a “historic blunder”.

Without going into the details, Farooq said: “India would have been different had he (Basu) been made Prime Minister.”

Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi said he was proud to have been a friend of Yechury’s, and described him as a bridge between the Congress and other parties in the INDIA coalition.

“There are people who are visible — who are upfront, you see them — and then there is the glue that is not visible but is actually what holds the structure together. I would say Mr Yechury was such a figure who, in the INDIA gathbandhan, certainly, and the last UPA gathbandhan, held the architecture together,” the Congress MP said.

“He was a person you could trust. He was a person (with whom) you were 100 per cent sure that he wasn’t compromised in today’s situation, where there are pressures.”

Rahul revealed that Yechury was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, from a meeting with former Congress president Sonia Gandhi at 10 Janpath.

“I saw him coughing and I realised that both of them have the same attitude when it comes to hospitals. Which is that neither of them wants to go to hospital under any circumstances,” Rahul said.

“I told him he had to go to the hospital and got my office to organise it. He was still trying to not go….”

Yechury died three weeks later at AIIMS from acute respiratory tract infection.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge recalled how Yechury had worked with all the Opposition parties to try and keep the conversation going.

It’s widely acknowledged within the INDIA grouping that it has no one who can pick up the phone and talk to any politician across the coalition with the ease with which Yechury did it.

The DMK’s Kanimozhi recalled not just Yechury’s troubleshooting skills, which made every INDIA constituent turn to him to iron out creases, but also his fearlessness and fluency in many languages.

While CPI leader D. Raja spoke of how he and Yechury discussed a reunion of the two communist parties, the Samajwadi Party’s Ram Gopal Yadav rued that there was none left who could get people to bury their differences for the larger goal of secularism and democracy. “He knew how to carry people along.”

Delhi minister Gopal Rai said Yechury used to be his go-to person when the Narendra Modi government put key Aam Aadmi Party leaders in prison.

“I was the only one out and reached out to Yechury. I met him in his office and he assured me that we would fight this out,” Rai said.

“The call for a public meeting of the INDIA bloc at Ramlila (Maidan) was given and, within five days, he got all the party leaders to attend it.”