Velikkakath Sankaran Achuthanandan, popularly known as VS, who turned 100 recently, is one of India’s rarest politicians. Supremely active until he neared this landmark, he was forced to retire after a paralytic stroke four years ago. Out of the public eye since then, the Marxist patriarch is one of India’s oldest living communists and one of the two surviving founders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The other is N. Sankaraiah of Tamil Nadu (101), who, along with VS, was among the 32 members to walk out from the Communist Party of India’s National Council in 1964 to form the CPI(M). At 82, VS was the oldest Indian politician to become chief minister in May 2006. When he was 87, he became the Opposition leader for the third time and served this office for the longest time — 14 years. When the veteran’s seventh and last legislative term ended in May 2021, he was one of India’s oldest legislators at 97.
VS should also be one of the few politicians who emerged as a popular icon after he turned 80, although his life until then was no less eventful. He is credited as the first to breach the division between micro and macro politics as he relentlessly championed causes like environment, gender justice, free software, among other issues, along with conventional political issues. Until being bedridden, VS relentlessly fought corruption not only in rival parties but also within his own fold. This angered the CPI(M)’s central leadership, which often penalised its senior-most comrade for flouting organisational discipline. Yet, this saw him rise as a cult hero outside the party.
Even though his stardom was late in coming, VS’s life has been a saga of struggle and survival from its beginning. Born to an Ezhava (an OBC caste) working-class family in the coastal Alappuzha district, which was soon to emerge as a red bastion, he lost both parents during his childhood. This forced him to drop out of school when he was in Class VII and start working in his brother’s clothes shop and then in a coir factory. Soon, he gravitated towards the nascent trade union activities in the region and to the CPI. Following the party’s directive, VS left his job to work among peasants in Kuttanad — Kerala’s rice bowl — in Alappuzha. He was among the communist leaders who organised the region’s peasants who were famished by the Second World War and exploited by the royal government-backed landlords. This culminated in the legendary Punnapra-Vayalar uprising against the Thiruvithamkoor royal government in 1946 in which hundreds of peasants armed only with spears made of sharpened coconut fronds clashed with a large, armed constabulary. More than 400 peasants died in the firing and Achuthanandan was arrested along with many communist leaders and subjected to brutal torture. Within a decade, Kerala became the first Indian state where the CPI came to power. Achuthanandan steadily rose in the party and was in the National Council in 1964. He became the CPI(M) state secretary in 1980 and rose to the Politburo in 1985.
Until then, VS’s fame remained largely within the party. But during the 1990s, VS emerged in a new avatar: he launched a struggle inside the CPI(M) against the growing signs of decay. He targeted the burgeoning corruption within the party-affiliated Centre of Indian Trade Unions. But the dominant leadership consisting of titans like E.M.S. Namboodiripad, E.K. Nayanar and others effectively checkmated VS. They repeatedly foiled his attempts to become the party secretary. He was stunned when his rivals thwarted his near-certain chance to become chief minister in 1996 by engineering his defeat in the assembly election from a bastion even when the party swept the polls in the state.
This made VS hungry for retribution and rework his war strategy. When the new chief ministership was being discussed at the party secretariat, VS played a masterstroke by making Nayanar cross over to his camp. This saw the party’s official candidate, Susheela Gopalan, being pipped by Nayanar to the post although the latter's name was never in the reckoning. With this, the tide began to swing in VS’s favour inside the party. His ‘Operation Nayanar’ was made successful by a young brigade from Kannur — the party citadel in the north (Nayanar belonged to Kannur) — led by none other than Pinarayi Vijayan. In 1998, the VS-Pinarayi camp decimated all its rivals in the organisational elections.
But soon, the wheel of power swung again. The Kannur comrades — the chief minister, Nayanar, and the state secretary, Vijayan — formed the new power centre and VS felt marginalised. This led to the bitter factional battle between VS and Vijayan. The emergence of 24-hour news channels fuelled the war, and VS openly accused his rivals of diluting the Marxist ideology and indulging in corruption and neoliberalism. He questioned the leadership’s attempts to forge opportunistic alliances with communal outfits. All these led the media and many intellectuals to shape a binary — VS as a symbol of virtue and Vijayan representing vice.
An open war of words between the two men led to both losing their berths in the Politburo in 2007. Though they were taken back later, VS was dropped again in 2009 as he continued his outburst against Vijayan on the multi-crore Lavalin scam. During this period, backed by a small group of intellectuals, VS also championed the causes of environment, gender rights and even free software, which embellished his public image further.
But while VS’s image as an idealist grew outside the party, Vijayan, as the longest-serving CPI(M) state secretary, was systematically working within to bolster his position. In 2005, all of VS’s nominees in the organisational elections lost, marking his near-eclipse inside the party. Yet, when the state leadership denied VS tickets in two subsequent assembly elections, the outcry in the media and the public made the central leadership unprecedentedly intervene in his favour on both occasions. When he became chief minister in 2006, overcoming a hostile leadership, he launched a massive drive against encroachers in the ecologically fragile Munnar region in the Western Ghats. Expectedly, this period saw open differences between the government and the party.
The CPI(M)'s then central leadership led by Prakash Karat consistently backed Vijayan while Sitaram Yechury was always considerate of VS. However, VS’s ‘defiance of discipline’ often made Yechury helpless. By 2016, when the Left Democratic Front won, VS’s clout in the party was almost over and Vijayan became the chief minister without any difficulty. When the LDF won again in 2021 — its first-ever consecutive win in the assembly in the only state where it is in power — Vijayan became the unquestioned choice even for the central leadership.
According to critics, VS’s use of ethics and other ‘media-friendly’ issues was not so much driven by his conviction as a deft tool to further his factional war. Perhaps. Yet, his efforts to resuscitate political morality from the margins to the centre of public discourse would ensure him a special place in history.
M.G. Radhakrishnan, a senior journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram, has worked with various print and electronic media organisations
