SITARAM YECHURY: THEORETICIAN OF PRAXIS AND THE PRACTITIONER OF THEORY
Nellore Narasimha Rao
Prabhat Patnaik summed up comrade Yechury’s personality in a single sentence “His affability, his lack of habit to put on airs, his gentleness and his modesty are legendary.”
Lenin’s entire life consisted of continuous study; without it he couldn’t have acted or formed judgments the way he did… Studying all the time and the readiness to allow himself to be taught by reality were due to the absolute priority he was prepared to give to practice. This fact in itself, but even more so the nature of his study, produced an unbridgeable gap between Lenin and every other empiricist or practitioner of Realpolitik. For him the reminder that totality must be the basis and standard of everything was not a mere debating point, or principle of teaching…Universality, totality and plain concreteness were the decisive definitions for the reality in which one has to act; every kind of practice gets to be truly efficient to the extent it is able to approach these categories.
– Georg Lukács
Comrade Sitaram Yechury followed Lenin’s method of practising politics throughout his political life.
His sudden demise came as a big shock to the political fraternity and also to his many friends, who fondly called him Sita. Yechury’s mode of practising politics was quite unique. He did his M.A. (1973-75) at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This centre was founded by late Professor Krishna Bharadwaj and was well known for its world class standards. After completing his M.A. with a very high CGPA, Yechury joined the centre as a PhD scholar and started working under Bharadwaj’s supervision. India was in a deep turmoil in those days and the Emergency was declared on June 25, 1975, which lasted for 21 months. During this period, all civil liberties were suspended, press freedom curtailed, elections cancelled and mass arrests took place on a massive scale. Yechury too was arrested for a brief period and later had to go underground.
Once the state of emergency was lifted on March 21, 1977 all the student leaders who went underground, came out and became politically active in JNU. Under certain strange circumstances, the JNUSU elections were held three times during 1977 and 1978. Yechury was elected president in all those three elections. Till date, he is the only person to have been elected as the president of the JNUSU for three successful terms. In view of the violations of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution during the Emergency, Yechury, being the president of the JNUSU, led a march to the official residence of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and courageously demanded her resignation as the chancellor of JNU.
Yechury was one of the chief architects of building a democratic culture of debate and discussion at JNU. He helped foster an atmosphere that actualised the possibility of academics and politics going hand in hand at the university. He was always at his persuasive best and unobtrusive in his approach in dealing with politics on the campus. Yechury used to chair general body meetings, which were often more than 15 hours long, and listened to more than 100 speakers. That’s how his charming personality impressed even his opponents and won him the presidential mandate thrice at JNU.
There used to be massive post-dinner discussions about various theoretical issues, such as the struggles that occurred between the Stalin and Trotsky factions after the Great October Revolution in Russia, about the building of a communist party and maintaining internal democracy in light of Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism against the Leninist party, the questions of continuity or (epistemological) break between Young Marx and later Marx, the theoretical formulations of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althuser and the issues related to the mode of production in Indian agriculture. Comrade Yechury used to participate in all these debates to defend the positions of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). He personified the JNU culture, which is not only critical but also thoughtful, curious and marked by a never ending grit to forge solidarities and alliances. This inseparable nature of his life from JNU culture endeared him to all the sections of the university. That is why, he is probably the only political leader to have been accorded a tearful homage inside its campus.
While at JNU, Yechury was first elected as the joint secretary of All India Student’s Federation of India (SFI), later becoming its general secretary and eventually its president. When he was inducted into the CPI(M)’s central committee in 1984, he was just 32 years old. He became a member of the party politburo in 1992 at 40 years of age. It was an open secret that comrades Prakash Karat and Yechury were groomed by party stalwarts – such as EMS Namboodiripad, then general secretary, Makineni Basavapunnaiah, party’s well known ideologue and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who built bridges, political alliances and friendships with other political parties – for carrying the burden of party leadership in the future.
Apart from building alliances and political friendships with the bourgeois democratic political parties, other than the communal Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), comrade Yechury played a significant role in shaping the party’s ideological positions in the light of the resolution adopted at the Burdwan Plenum in 1968. Between 1987 and 1990, the party central committee adopted three resolutions on the deviations that were taking place in the Soviet communist party and their implications on the very existence of socialism in the Soviet Union. Yechury played a huge role in drafting these documents, which ultimately became the foundation of the subsequent ideological positions adopted by the party.
When communists all over the world encountered a big ideological crisis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Yechury prepared and moved a resolution at the 14th party congress held in Chennai in 1992. The resolution stated that the Soviet Union’s collapse neither invalidated Marxist-Leninist theoretical propositions and their relevance, nor erased the history of socialism.
In the words of comrade Prakash Karat, “It was comrade Sitaram, who piloted the resolution in the Congress and summed up the discussions in his reply. For the first time, an ideological document was prepared and, on behalf of the politburo, was presented by a member of the central secretariat – a job which would have been normally done by M. Basavapunnaiah. This demonstrated the party’s recognition of Sitaram as a Marxist theoretician. Since then, Sitaram became the prime moving force in the politburo on ideological matters. “
Thus, one can see Yechury’s contribution to all resolutions related to ideology, including the “Resolution on Some Ideological Issues’’ adopted by the party’s 20th Congress held in Kozhikode in 2012. Under the changed correlation of forces in international politics after the fall of the Soviet Union, the consequent emergence of a unipolar world under the hegemony of the US imperialism, and the change in the capitalist path of development in India due to the neoliberal globalisation, a need was felt to update the party program that was adopted in 1964.
As a member of the programme commission set up by the party under comrade Surjeet as the convener, comrade Yechury successfully updated the section on capitalist path of development by applying his understanding about the functioning of international finance capital and the nature of neoliberal capitalism.
The glorious Indian freedom movement encountered communalism as a disruptive force, created by the reactionary social classes and their representative political forces. On the eve of Indian Independence, there was mayhem due to communal riots in which thousands of innocent people were perished. This communal sentiment eventually also claimed Mahatma Gandhi’s life. The same communal forces, under the leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), became clearly visible in the socio-political arena towards the end of 1980s. Comrade Yechury grasped the essence of this political conjuncture that was fraught with the possibility of Hindutva forces gaining hegemony over the entire country, posing a threat to secularism, pluralism and democracy guaranteed by the Constitution. As the Hindu’s N. Ram stated, “Sitaram prioritised the fight for secularism, pluralism and democracy in an intellectually vigorous, ideologically sophisticated and passionate way.”
Indian democracy entered a peculiar ‘neo fascist’ phase with the BJP’s victory in 2014 with the emergence of the ‘Modi phenomenon’ in Indian politics. Economist Prabhat Patnaik explains it succinctly. “Fascist groups exist in all modern societies, usually as fringe elements; they come to centre-stage only with financial and media support of monopoly capital when it finds it necessary to have an alliance with such elements. This happens in periods of economic crisis when the regime of monopoly capital loses its old ideological prop that gave it an ethical justification; the fascists provide it with a new prop through a complete change in discourse.
The new discourse focuses on creating hatred against the ‘Other’ instead of issues like unemployment and material distress. Apart from its diversionary role during a crisis, it also seeks to divide the working people, scuttling prospects of united resistance against the hegemony of monopoly capital. The rise in unemployment during crisis also provides a fertile source of recruitment for fascist thugs. It is hardly surprising that the current neo fascist upsurge is occurring in a period of crisis of neoliberal capitalism.
Because of this weakening, the share of surplus in output (the excess of labour productivity over real wage divided by labour productivity) increases within countries and in the world as a whole; and since a larger share of wage income is consumed than of surplus income, this causes an ‘overproduction crisis’ of the sort we have now. There is no solution to this crisis, through State intervention, within neoliberalism itself. State expenditure can increase aggregate demand only if it is financed in either of two ways: a fiscal deficit (which means nobody is being taxed), or taxing the capitalists and the rich (who save a part of their income); taxing workers who consume what they earn for increasing State expenditure does not raise aggregate demand. But globalised finance that dictates State policy under neo liberalism dislikes both these ways. Hence even neo fascism cannot overcome the crisis, unlike in the 1930s when classical fascism had overcome the Depression through military expenditure financed by fiscal deficits. This difference from classical fascism is what justifies the prefix, ‘neo’. ’
Comrade Yechury was sharp enough to grasp the complexity of the neo fascist phenomenon as was explained by Patnaik, who was also his teacher. He realised that unless all democratic forces united, it would be very difficult to contain the onslaught of saffron fascism on the democratic institutions and traditions guaranteed by the Constitution. With this commitment, he strove with perseverance to mollify the anxieties of democratic parties in view of the bigger neo fascist threat and made his critical voice heard in parliament against the dictatorial policies of the BJP government as a member of Rajya Sabha.
It was in the midst of this strenuous work that his lungs were infected, leading to his untimely death. Comrade Yechury is known much more today than when he was alive. He practised his politics following Lenin’s dictum: “concrete analysis of concrete situation is the living essence of dialectics”. Patnaik summed up comrade Yechury’s personality in a single sentence “His affability, his lack of habit to put on airs, his gentleness and his modesty are legendary.”
Nellore Narasimha Rao, JNU alumnus, associated with Nava Telangana Daily Newspaper, which is published from Hyderabad.