Communist veteran, freedom fighter, and former Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan turns 101

Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] veteran, freedom fighter and former Chief Minister of Kerala, V. S. Achuthanandan, turned 101 on Sunday (October 20, 2024). 

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan complimented, “dear Comrade VS”, as Mr. Achuthanandan is popularly known, for crossing the centennial mark. 

Mr. Achuthanandan’s momentous life is a story of astonishing resilience and fortitude.

A fighter, Mr. Achuthanandan seems unwilling to surrender to the inexorable march of time. He entered hospice care in 2019 after suffering a stroke. Mr. Achuthanandan is convalescing at his son V A Arun Kumar’s house at Barton Hill in Thiruvananthapuram. Doctors have barred visitors, given his advanced age and the threat of infection. 

Mr. Arun Kumar told reporters that Mr. Achuthanandan kept abreast of political developments. He had newspapers read out to him daily and watched television news.

Mr. Achuthanandan, an iron-jawed dogmatic communist, was a towering and fiery presence in Kerala politics for decades.

He rose above the cut and thrust of provincial politics by emerging as a zealous advocate for underdogs, including sexual minorities, gender equality, environmental protection and free software. 

Mr. Achuthanandan appeared to have eclipsed his predecessors by becoming the only communist leader in Kerala who lived in the time of Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guerra and Mao. 

Agrarian upbringing

Mr. Achuthanandan was born into a family of agricultural workers at Punappara in Alappuzha in 1923. He lost his parents early, his mother to smallpox. 

Pioneering communist leader P Krishna Pillai initiated him to the freedom movement at 16. Mr. Achuthanandan often referred to Pillai as his ideological lodestar. 

A life of trials

Mr. Achuthanandan’s odyssey from a young freedom fighter to Kerala’s Chief Minister has been a harrowing story of personal trials and tribulations.

He endured the worst deprivations of poverty and often joked about how he survived for months on a single set of clothes and Spartan food. Mr. Achuthanandan apprenticed with his elder brother as a tailor before plunging into mainstream communist politics in 1940. 

Left for dead

Mr. Achuthanandan was on the frontline of the storied armed struggle against feudal landlords and colonial serfdom in Alappuzha. The uprising led to the police firing that killed scores of communist revolutionaries in Punnappara and Vayalar in 1946.

Mr. Achuthanandan was arrested, brutally tortured in police custody and left for dead. A petty thief alerted the police about signs of life in Mr. Achuthanandan, causing law enforcers to hospitalise the leader. 

CPI(M) founding leader

In 1964, Mr. Achuthanandan left the Communist Party of India’s (CPI) national council to become one of the founding members of the breakaway CPI(M). He is the only founding CPI(M) member still alive. 

The government jailed Mr. Achuthanandan during the Emergency. Later, Mr. Achuthanandan made a mark as an anti-corruption crusader by impleading corruption cases, including the Idamalayar trial, which resulted in the conviction of the late Kerala Congress leader R. Balakrishnan Pillai.

Pursuer of “lost causes”

Mr. Achuthanandan pursued arguably lost causes that resonated strongly among ordinary people. He was a staunch feminist who advocated the incarceration of influential political leaders and business persons implicated in the infamous “ice cream parlour sex racket” case in Kozhikode. Mr. Achuthanandan’s activist line resulted in the rout of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) in Malabar in 2006. 

As Chief Minister, he initiated a demolition drive to evict land grabbers from Munnar with mixed results amid strong opposition from within the CPI(M).

Mr. Achuthanandan also spearheaded the drinking water agitation against the Coca-Cola company at Plachimada, fought against land grabbers at Mathikettan, and championed gender rights.

Mr. Achuthanandan acquired the public image of a relentless crusader for people’s causes. His green activism pushed environmental protection to the forefront of national politics.

A crowd puller

The veteran politician was also a crowd-puller. His rallies were magnets for the public, keen to listen to his distinctive oratory style, marked by a rustic drawl bristling with biting and often sarcastic humour. 

Party discipline

Mr. Achuthanandan, who had officiated as CPI(M) State secretary, was not always a stickler for party discipline.

In 2007, the CPI(M) ejected him from the party’s Polit Bureau for defying the CPI(M) State secretariat.

Later, in 2012, Mr Achuthanandan defied party diktat and called on slain CPI(M) dissident and Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrasekharan’s wife, K. K. Rema. The Congress weaponised the visit to assail the CPI(M), which it blamed for the killing.

Criticism

Mr. Achuthandan had come under criticism for arguably being out of tune with the harsh socio-economic realities of Neo-liberalism, pursuing factionalist politics in the CPI(M)  and attacking party colleagues for their alleged right-wing deviation.