Knowing as he did that our study of Marx and Marxist scholarship has taught us more comprehensively of the dynamics of historical transformations, or lack thereof, comrade Sitaram Yechury seemed always to recognise that no social theory, however scientific or comprehensive, ever quite catches up with the inexhaustible twists and turns of collective human life.
This overarching sense that theoretical correctness, no matter how correct, may not always yield the expected social fruit afforded a unique place for intelligence above and beyond intellect to Sita’s considerations about the problematics of ideology.
Remembering always to weigh the great emphasis that Marx placed on the “concrete” of historical formations and their discrete susceptibilities or possibilities, Sita as a communist leader knew that especially in so contentiously diverse a space as India, no impatient impulse to effect a monochromatic change could yield desired results in a hurry.
Indeed, as he undertook in-depth study of right-wing literature and praxis on such questions, Sita came to recognise that a uniting, democratic left politics was the first need to prevent the collapse of constitutional India into formal fascism.
It is no secret that Sita met with strong opposition to the practical implications of such a view for the party , but it is a tribute both to his conviction and argumentation and to the democratic verve of party organisations that such debates always yielded democratic results.
Also read: A Fighter and a Thinker, Sitaram Yechury Leaves Behind a Towering Legacy
But here is something else: many of us highly educated ones profess from one learned conference to another to be torchbearers of emancipated values which in fact not many of us actually practice in our everyday conduct and conviction. Think how we often deride autocrats but remain autocrats ourselves.
Among the tallest of India’s communist leaders who actually were communists not just in the head but deep in their hearts, Sita was one.
He seemed to have no pretentious sense of self, no superior derisiveness for those who were not read in Marxism, no supercilious contempt for citizens who remained glued to their religious faiths, and no pretence that he was lord of all knowledge, be it of the present or the future.
I have wholesome memories of Sita listening attentively to views wholly inimical to reason or proof, and realising that such matters were not amenable to instant redress. Whether it is the question of religion, race, or caste, he as an intellectual and a political leader recognised that unless we who think otherwise studied these archives intensively, we could not hope to counter the unreason that was so potently disfiguring our collective lives.
Not coercion but the power of argument he often contended was the more far-reaching tactic to enfeeble fascist strategy, and his interventions in parliamentary debates often provided proof of this conviction and ability.
I will remember with painful delight the many occasions when I would freely dive into Sita’s pockets to pull out the cigarettes I knew he had stashed away.
Alas, how stupid and how tragic that delight was to prove.
We know ‘communism’ comes from the Latin word communis, meaning, ‘to hold in common’.
Few of Sita’s peers, I make bold to say, lived this commonness as willingly and joyfully as he did.
It is not said without reason that a good communist must first be a good human being.
Sita exemplified that dictum to the tee, and I will never cease to love and honour him for this.
Nothing that was human was alien to comrade Sita, to whom I suffix my Lal Salam.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
