VS Achuthanandan: Thousands pay tribute to veteran Indian communist leader

Thousands are paying their respects to veteran Indian communist leader VS Achuthanandan whose funeral will be held on Wednesday.

VS, as he was popularly known, died on Monday at the age of 101. He was a founding member of India’s largest communist party and a former chief minister of the southern state of Kerala.

Tens of thousands of people have thronged the streets to pay tribute to the politician, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in Kerala’s political history.

Forced to drop out of school as a child, Achuthanandan overcame grinding poverty and torture in police custody to become one of the state’s most beloved leaders.

He was being treated at a hospital in Thiruvananathapuram after suffering a cardiac arrest last month. His funeral will be held near his hometown in Alappuzha district with full state honours.

“Fighting for the rights of the oppressed and the exploited was the guiding principle of his life,” MA Baby, general secretary of Achuthanandan’s party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or (CPI(M)), wrote in tribute. He described the leader as “the epitome of struggle”.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, also from the CPI(M), called Achuthanandan a “limitless repository of inspiration and lessons”.

Apart from being Kerala’s chief minister, Achuthanandan was the state’s leader of opposition three times and a member of the CPI(M)’s Politburo for 23 years.

Achuthanandan’s popularity among Indian communists rivals only that of Jyoti Basu, the long-serving West Bengal chief minister and CPI(M) co-founder.

But unlike the London-educated Basu, Achuthanandan came from humble roots and didn’t finish school. While Basu shaped his legacy in power, Achuthanandan did so from the streets, championing people’s issues as an opposition leader.

Achuthanandan started working young after losing his mother at four and father at 11. As a teen in a coir factory, he joined the undivided Communist Party at 17 and began organising agricultural workers in Travancore in then British-ruled India.

AK Antony, a former Kerala chief minister from the Congress party, said that as a school student in the 1960s, he would wait beside paddy fields to listen to Achuthanandan’s speeches.

“Achuthanandan’s life and struggles and the torture and beatings he endured in the vanguard of the communist agitations for bonded agriculture workers in Kuttanad are unequalled and historical,” he was quoted as saying by The Hindu newspaper.

Achuthanandan led a 1946 revolt against the state authorities, in which hundreds of communists were reportedly killed. He went underground, was later arrested, tortured in custody, and spent five years in jail.

His work spanned labour rights, land rights, education, women’s right, anti-corruption measures and environmental protection.

A staunch communist, Achuthanandan wasn’t afraid to defy his party – most notably when he met the widow of TP Chandrasekharan, murdered in 2012 by a gang that included former CPI(M) colleagues after he broke away to form his own party.

After public outcry forced the CPI(M) to reverse its attempts to sideline him in 2006 and 2011, Achuthanandan served as Kerala’s chief minister (2006–2011) before retiring from public life following a 2019 stroke and living with his son in Thiruvananthapuram.

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