There was something elemental about V.S. Achuthanandan that defied both the odds and the categories. For a man who could simultaneously be the party's sharpest internal critic and its most dependable public face, he embodied the conflicts in Kerala's communist landscape – radical in oratory yet archaic in form, beloved but forever contested. 

When he passed away on Monday (July 21) at the age of 102, an entire era of Indian communist politics drew to a close.

For those of us who covered him closely – I followed his political journey as a television journalist from 2001 to 2011 – Achuthanandan was more than a news subject. He was a political force that shaped our understanding of what principled opposition could look like in an age of increasing moral compromise. Sometimes, it felt like Stockholm syndrome; there were moments when his justifications became our own, his voice seemed speaking through us. 

I remember leaving interviews feeling like I'd been recruited rather than reporting. Looking back from today's landscape of compliant media and transactional politics, I feel more pride than guilt in admitting to that past complicity.

The making of a revolutionary leader

Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan's political consciousness was forged in the crucible of pre-independence Kerala, where caste oppression, feudal exploitation, and colonial rule created the perfect conditions for revolutionary awakening. Born in 1923 in Punnapra, Alappuzha – a village that would later become synonymous with workers' resistance – his early life read like a blueprint for communist leadership. Orphaned by age 11, forced to quit school after the seventh standard, he found work meshing coir in a factory where the seeds of his class consciousness first took root.

The transformation from worker to organiser came naturally. By 15, he had joined the Communist movement, and by the 1940s, he was instrumental in founding the Travancore Karshaka Thozhilali Union – the farm labour union. But it was the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising of 1946 that truly forged him as a revolutionary leader. As the person in charge of 1,200 volunteers across three camps, he experienced both the exhilaration of mass resistance and its brutal consequences.

The price he paid was severe. Captured by police, he endured torture so extreme that his captors left him for dead – his legs pulled between prison bars, beaten with lathis until he was "black and blue". This near-death experience, rather than breaking his spirit, only strengthened his resolve. Over his long political life, he would spend more than five years in prison and nearly four and a half years living underground.

These experiences created a leader who never forgot what it meant to live without privilege, money or lineage. Most of those who cried for Achuthanandan on the streets were people with no inheritance, no family name to boast, no connections. He belonged to them in a way that transcended party machinery.

The rebel who never quite fit

What made Achuthanandan unique – and perpetually troublesome to his own party – was his refusal to subordinate moral clarity to organisational discipline. As one of only 32 leaders who walked out of the Communist Party of India in 1964 to form the CPI(M), he was a founding figure of the party. Yet, throughout his seven-decade-long political career, he remained its most persistent internal critic.

His rebellious streak wasn't born of ambition but of an almost obsessive commitment to what he saw as communist principles. Time and again, he clashed with party leadership over issues of corruption, cronyism and moral compromise. When the SNC Lavalin case implicated his rival, Pinarayi Vijayan, Achuthanandan dissented in his own cabinet. When party leaders protected tainted ministers, he broke ranks publicly. Such acts of defiance cost him dearly – suspension from the politburo in 2009, eventual expulsion, and constant marginalisation within the organisation he had helped build.

Yet, each time the party tried to sideline him, Kerala's people pulled him back. The most dramatic instance came in 2006, when the CPI(M) initially denied him a ticket for the assembly elections. The moment the news broke, spontaneous protests erupted across the state. Students walked out of classrooms, auto drivers abandoned passengers mid-ride to join street processions. It was a rebellion not of the cadre, but of the people.

Twenty-nine state committee members visited him in a single evening. Twelve districts passed resolutions demanding his reinstatement. The party was forced to listen. He would contest from Malampuzha, win decisively and become chief minister at the age of 82 – one of the oldest in Indian history.

The moral crusader

What distinguished Achuthanandan from other political leaders was his extraordinary connection with ordinary people, particularly those failed by the system. This was never more evident than in his response to the Suryanelli gangrape case in Idukki district – a Stockholm Syndrome moment for me.

On April 20, 2005, the Kerala high court delivered a devastating verdict, acquitting 35 of 36 accused in the case where a 16-year-old girl was raped by 40 men over 56 days. The judges went further, describing the survivor as "morally depraved" and someone who "willingly enjoyed sexual pleasure." The verdict shattered the girl and her family, who contemplated suicide.

A desperate phone call reached Achuthanandan from a colleague of the girl's father, Marcos. Within hours, he called them back: "I'm coming to Idukki next week. Come meet me at the guest house. We'll talk and decide the next steps together."

When Marcos met him in that room, Achuthanandan asked everyone else to leave. Taking the broken father's hands in his own, he said, "Don't lose hope. We'll fight this. I will stand with you all the way to the Supreme Court."

"If I hadn't received that call," Marcos told me in 2006, "my children and I wouldn't be alive today."

This was V.S. Achuthanandan the humanist; the comrade who held broken people together with little more than resolve and tenderness. His political career is dotted with such interventions: standing with families devastated by sex scandals, taking on encroachers in Munnar, challenging the lottery mafia, and fighting film piracy. He understood that politics, at its best, was about defending the dignity of those who had no other defenders.

The many ropes he kept ready

Yet there was another V.S. Achuthanandan too – one who was more ruthless, more calculating, more dangerous. In the 1960s, while Achuthanandan was serving as the Alappuzha district secretary of the newly formed CPI(M), he discovered that a political rival was secretly seeing a widow in his village. One night, Achuthanandan’s loyalists caught the man and tied him to a coconut tree until dawn, leaving him there for the entire village to witness his shame.

When questioned later by a party inquiry commission, the humiliated man said only this: "It was new rope. They had kept the rope ready. They were just waiting for the moment."

This story, narrated to me by veteran journalist G. Yedukula Kumar, revealed something essential about Achuthanandan's political method. He had many such ropes – some spun from party vengeance, others from love. This capacity for both tenderness and rigidity made him a formidable political icon but also a difficult ally. He could be vindictive, sometimes dogmatic, often unwilling to build consensus. He sometimes mistook personal vendettas for political causes.

The caged chief minister

When Achuthanandan finally became chief minister in 2006, the party ensured he would govern with his hands tied. He faced what no other Kerala chief minister had faced before: a cabinet not of his choosing, a staff chosen without his consent, bureaucrats who took orders from the party instead of him. The home ministry portfolio was taken away immediately. His major initiatives – from evicting encroachments in Munnar to streamlining land titles – were systematically undermined by party colleagues and their business allies.

His style as chief minister reflected his outsider status within his own government. When Achuthanandan used the word "oligarch," in a letter to the politburo to describe businessman Faris Aboobacker, we reporters struggled to translate it as "a nouveau riche man seeking power." The next day, Achuthanandan rephrased it in Malayalam with a single devastating word: verukkappettavan, the despised. Just with that single streak, Faris's Rs 2,000 crore waterfront development project in Kochi vanished.

By 2010, he was a chief minister in name alone – abandoned, isolated, though never broken. 

When the 2011 elections approached with polls predicting UDF victory, the party again moved to cut him out, this time citing his age. But once again, Kerala responded. His face filled posters, processions roared through towns. People were ready to elect a 90-year-old because they believed he alone could defend their dignity.

The end of an era

V.S. Achuthanandan's death marks more than the passing of a political leader; it represents the end of a particular kind of communist politics – one rooted in genuine mass struggle, uncompromising on questions of corruption and willing to challenge power regardless of its source.

He didn't leave behind many followers in CPI(M) to anoint a successor. He didn't soften his positions to become more lovable. But in dying, Achuthanandan has left a vacuum too large for even his fiercest critics to ignore.

What O.V. Vijayan wrote when E.M.S. Namboodiripad passed away is relevant to V.S. Achuthanandan too: "Were it not for him, our lives would have been more impoverished – socially, politically, morally. We would have been smaller people. Red Salute, Comrade"

M.P. Basheer, a journalist and writer based in Trivandrum, was the executive editor of Kerala’s first TV news channel, Indiavision.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.