Sitaram Yechury elected as new CPM chief

Sitaram Yechury was unanimously elected the new chief or general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) at the party congress that concluded in Visakhapatnam on Sunday.

He succeeds Prakash Karat, who completed a maximum three terms of three years each that is allowed by the party constitution.

Earlier, the party congress elected a 91-member central committee. The latter then unanimously elected Yechury, who is also a Rajya Sabha member, as new general secretary.

Karat proposed the name of Yechury, his junior from their days as students at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in the early 1970s. Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai, 77-year-old leader from Kerala who was earlier in the race, seconded it.

The new central committee will have five special invitees and as many permanent invitees, including former Kerala chief minister V S Achuthanandan, 91, who was last month dropped from the Kerala state committee for dissent.

The central committee also elected a 16-member politburo. West Bengal Lok Sabha member Mohammad Salim, Subhashini Ali, Hannan Mollah and G Ramakrishnan are the new entrants.

The existing 12 remain. These are: Yechury, Karat, Pillai, Biman Basu, Tripura CM Manik Sarkar, Pinarayi Vijayan, B V Raghavulu, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, M A Baby, Surjya Kanta Mishra, A K Padmanabhan and Brinda Karat.

The election of Yechury to the top post didn't turn out to be bitter or keenly contested as some in the party had anticipated.

It was expected the Bengal unit would support Yechury and the powerful Kerala unit would favour Pillai. However, most in the party were convinced that the CPI(M) needed a younger and dynamic face in 62-year-old Yechury than Pillai was, at what is a challenging time for the party. The party is going through a tough rebuilding phase, where it needs to attract youth and faces two crucial assembly elections in Bengal and Kerala in 2016. The CPI(M) is currently at a four-decade low in terms of presence in state legislatures and in Parliament.

Delivering his inaugural address as the party general secretary, Yechury termed the just-concluded 21st congress as a “congress of the future”, which had resolved to build independent strength of the party and work towards forging Left unity.

Yechury said the party would hold a special organisation plenum later this year to discuss ways to strengthen itself.

Yechury said the Narendra Modi government’s communal agenda, its more aggressive pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies and erosion of democratic practices as the new ‘trimurti’ or ‘triumvirate’ of challenges, which the CPI(M) should stop from converting into a ‘trishul’ (trident) “to pierce into the heart of the nation”. Yechury said the “objective situation” was ripe for the advance of people’s struggle but for this, the CPI(M) required to bolster itself.

Yechury, a Rajya Sabha MP, said the question of the relevance of socialism is frequently asked. “If there is any future of human civilisation, that future lies in socialism,” he declared.

YECHURY’S RISE

• Sitaram Yechury, 62, did his schooling in Andhra Pradesh, graduated im economics from Delhi’s St Stephen's College and joined Jawaharlal Nehru University
   
• He was active in the Students Federation of India, was arrested during the Emergency and later, became JNU students union president
   
• Yechury was a member of the CPI(M) central committee member from 1984 and politburo member in 1992
   
• Yechury was close to Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet and played an important role during the UPA-I years as member of the steerimg committee
   
• He became a member of the Rajya Sabha in 2005 and again in 2011
  

 

He is one of the most suave faces in the CPI(M) and has a good rapport with leaders from across the political spectrum
 

Yechury is married to journalist Seema Chishti