'In Parliament, he was the one person who stood for democracy and secularism even when the principal Opposition party was not very forthright in taking on the BJP and RSS.'
It is not an exaggerated statement if we were to say the Left in India will no longer be the same with the passing away of Sitaram Yechury.
John Brittas, the Rajya Sabha MP, remembers Yechury, a leader whom he admired from the time he was a college student.
"A great quality of Sitaram was that he could mingle with all kinds of people, and with ease... When I travelled with him a couple of times, I saw the way he struck conversations with other passengers on the train. He asked many questions with a lot of curiosity. He used to even talk about Bollywood movies with them," Brittas tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.
Do you remember the first time you met Sitaram Yechury?
I would say I knew him well even before I met him. He was a student leader, and I was also in the SFI (Students Federation of India, the CPI-M's student wing) but confined to the Kerala campus.
All of us looked up to him with awe and admiration as he was so charismatic as a student leader.
None of us students could ever forget the picture of him reading the chargesheet against Smt. Indira Gandhi during the Emergency days. It was an image that was stuck in our minds forever.
That was Sitaram Yechury for us students; a bold, charismatic student leader whom everyone wanted to follow.
As a college student in Kerala, I aspired to study at JNU because that was where people like Sitaram Yechury and (Yechury's predecessor as CPI-M general secretary) Prakash Karat studied. We were in awe of the way they led the students movement.
Their struggles to champion the rights of the student community had a deep impact on me. The slogan they used to raise was, 'Study and Struggle'.
The more I read about Sitaram, the more I admired him.
There were cover stories on him in various prominent Malayalam magazines, and those stories made me feel I knew him so well even before I met him much later in life.
So, he was like a celebrity...
Yes, he was a celebrity in Kerala because he was very charismatic.
In the 1980s when I studied, the campuses in Kerala looked forward to him addressing the students.
I had attended a few such meetings, and the students were all charged up listening to him. I even remember the corduroy pants he wore then!
We were enamoured of the way he spoke one line in Malayalam and also his mannerisms.
He was our hero. For us, he was like a Bollywood hero. He was the young leader who accompanied EMS (E M S Namboodiripad, the first chief minister of a democratically elected Communist government in the world and veteran Marxist) to various countries.
This was the larger than life image I had of him before I came to Delhi to study at JNU in 1988.
I joined the JNU campus as a full-time research scholar while also working as a journalist.
When did you finally meet your hero?
I still remember the first meeting. That was at 14, Ashoka Road. It was an old government bungalow from where the CPI-M was operating in those days as the party didn't have an office of its own.
We saw top Left leaders like E M S Namboodiripad, Harkishan Surjeet, M Basavapunnaiah, B T Ranadive etc there along with these two young leaders, Prakash Karat and Sitaram. Those two sat quietly. It was the golden era of Communism in India.
We kept a distance from the senior leaders as they were so senior, but these two were so young and they were like they belonged to our generation.
Sitaram and I struck up a rapport instantly. He used to smoke at that time; I also. I remember it all started with him taking a cigarette from my shirt pocket and lighting it.
That was the way he used to mingle with people, with no inhibitions at all.
We used to have lunch at 14, Ashoka Road. I remember after lunch, we used to sit and smoke. Even Prakash Karat used to smoke once in a while in those days.
At JNU, I was put up in the Vithalbhai Patel House where Sitaram also was staying. Those days, VP House was almost like a commune with most of the Communist leaders living there. That is how I met all the great Communist leaders.
In the morning, we used to have a badminton session and Sitaram used to play with us.
What kind of impression did you get when you finally met and spoke to him in person?
One thing I realised after speaking to him was that he would have a very long innings in politics, and that the party would be shouldered by people like him.
That was because he had that insightful understanding of politics.
One good thing about Sitaram was that he was not limited to one vertical or two verticals. He had extensive knowledge of so many topics that you could talk to him about sports, you could talk to him about culture, you could talk to him about economics, you could talk to him about sociology.. any subject under the sun.
He was flexible in his opinion, and he was brilliant in all the subjects. He would finish a book in one fourth of the time we took.
An intellectual...
No doubt about it. An intelligent intellectual.
Though the mainstream media paint Communist leaders as people with a stiff upper lip, Sitaram was a different human being altogether.
A great quality of Sitaram was that he could mingle with all kinds of people, and with ease. He could easily pick up a conversation with anybody. He had no difficulty in exchanging ideas and views with anyone.
When I travelled with him a couple of times, I saw the way he struck conversations with other passengers on the train. He asked many questions with a lot of curiosity. He used to even talk about Bollywood movies with them.
He had a multicultural background. He had a perspective on everything.
Would you say though he was the intellectual face of the Communist party, he was a people's leader, a mass leader?
He was definitely a mass leader. Wherever he went, he attracted people, not just Communists, but everybody.
I have seen that the admiration and acceptance of Sitaram Yechury was intact and impeccable even when the fortunes of the Left were dwindling.
I remember the way in which he used to deliver his speeches in Parliament. They were studied interfaces which inspired many sections of people, outside the physical frame of the CPI-M.
The academic community in India used to look up to Sitaram Yechury for inspiration.
That was the time when Indian politics and culture was changing, that was the time there was a parochial view of the entire political discourse and history was being rewritten. Sitaram had a clear perspective about what was happening.
Whenever the RSS came up with some new findings of history, he would narrate to them what the real history behind it was.
He was a stumbling block for the RSS in their efforts to rewrite history.
It was very difficult for them to attack him as, first of all, he was erudite and then he had the facts.
In Parliament, he was the one person who stood for democracy and secularism even when the principal Opposition party was not very forthright in taking on the BJP and the RSS.
He used to say that we had to tackle the RSS not only politically but culturally too because he felt they wanted to manipulate the minds of the people culturally.
He used to say we had to be very careful.
How concerned was he about the rise of right-wing politics in India?
He was very concerned. I remember in 2005 when he came to the Rajya Sabha, the Left was supporting the UPA (the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance).
In his speeches, he used to warn those so-called secular parties that they shouldn't be complacent about the BJP.
He said that without any aspiration for power, we wholeheartedly supported the Congress with the prime motto of keeping the BJP away from power.
If you listen to all his Parliament speeches, you will see that one part of all his speeches was devoted to the importance of checkmating the ideology of the BJP and the RSS, and why and how the secular parties should not fumble in their efforts.
His words came true as they didn't listen to his warnings.
He was very clear about all this in one of his interviews with me for Kairali TV (the Kerala-based television channel).
One thing I can say about his personality is that he never got angry or showed any disillusionment. Even when the party lost very badly, he was one person who was relentlessly working.
I am sure the concept of INDIA would have come from him, as he was interacting with Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi a lot.
How do you see the Left without a leader like Sitaram Yechury?
It is going to be very difficult. It shouldn't be a concern for the Left alone; it should be a concern for all the democratic forces in India.
Normally when people pass away, we bring in adjectives like, it is a void, it is a huge loss, big loss, etc.
But in Sitaram's case, it is a huge loss for not just the Left but for every secular party in India. I would say, it is not limited to just politics, even for academia, it is a huge loss.
It is a huge loss for anyone who believes in the free thought process like environmentalists, those who fight for the rights of Dalits, slumdwellers...
These people may not be part of the Left umbrella, but all those who fight for the rights of people and the environment will find his death a huge loss.
Sitaram was all the time fighting for them without thinking about his fortunes or the fortunes of his party.
Yes, he has left behind a huge vacuum which is very difficult to fill.
Was he Sitaram to everybody?
He was Sita to all those who was very close to him, Sitaram to those close to him and Yechury to all the others.
Depending on the closeness of people to him, he was Sita, Sitaram and Yechury.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
