Cantonment House wears an unusually deserted look. The security men guarding the gates look relaxed. The crowds that line up to meet the occupant of this government bungalow in Thiruvananthapuram are missing. The house — a landmark in the Kerala capital — even looks unoccupied.

It’s not — but its resident, Velikkakath Sankaran Achuthanandan, is taking a break from his backbreaking schedule. The former Kerala chief minister is undergoing a 10-day ayurveda treatment. The oil massages, interspersed with rest, are meant to rejuvenate the 88-year-old leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who has been fighting battles on many fronts.

A month ago, he won a battle in New Delhi against the official leadership of the party in the state. A faction of the Kerala CPI(M) unit, led by secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, had sought the expulsion of Achuthanandan — popularly known as VS — from the party’s Central Committee (CC) of which VS has been a member since the CPI(M) was formed in 1964.

They wanted stern action against VS for breaching party discipline in several forums. A leading Malayalam newspaper reported that VS had, in turn, accused the state leadership of violating ideological party discipline. In the end, VS got away with a public censure from the CC.

VS — though known to be outspoken — is not going to talk about the infighting in the party. That’s his condition for agreeing to an interview. If he speaks out of line another time, he knows that he’ll no longer be able to get away with a rebuke. So he would rather talk about happier times.

“I joined the Communist movement when I was working for a British coir- making factory in the early 1940s,” he says. “I worked as a labourer in the factory for two years and it was around that time that P. Krishna Pillai, founder of the Communist movement in Kerala, asked me to organise coir factory workers who were exploited by both British and Indian coir factory owners.”

Subsequently, he was sent to Kuttanad, the picturesque backwaters once called the rice bowl of Kerala. His work with landless labourers not only resulted in better wages for them but led to small farmers joining the Communists. By the time he moved to Alapuzha town to build strong trade union movements among fish workers and small-time traders in 1946, he had established himself as an “organisation man”.

In a pink polo shirt and traditional Kerala lungi, VS looks relaxed as he leans back in a reclining chair. His room — in fact, the entire bungalow — is sparingly furnished. Barring a couple of cupboards and a row of chairs, the visitors’ room is largely empty. A caricature of V.S., presented to him by a film society in north Malabar, and an official Kerala government calendar are the only hangings that adorn its walls.

The Marxist strongman recalls how, as the Alapuzha district committee secretary, he was instrumental in making the district a stronghold of the CPI(M) in the state. “Alapuzha sent as many as nine CPI legislators to the first Kerala Assembly, compared to five or six seats won in other districts,” VS reminisces.

Among the major inspirations for him, VS says, were land reforms and interventions in the educational sector initiated by the first Communist government led by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1957. The far-reaching reforms were not acceptable to some influential sections of Kerala society, leading to the dismissal of Namboodiripad’s government two years later.

“But when we came back to power in 1967 we not only retracted some retrograde measures which successive governments had started, but also completed the reforms agenda. These two landmark laws and their implementation have played a significant role in improving the socio-economic indicators of Kerala as we know today,” VS stresses.

The land reforms restricted land that a family could keep to a maximum of 15 acres. All traditional landholding families were to return the surplus land to the government for distribution among landless people.

Born to Velikkakth Sankaran and Accama in 1923 in Punnapra in Alapuzha district, VS lost his parents before he became a teenager. Forced to drop out of school after Class VIII, he started out as a helper to his elder brother in the latter’s village tailoring shop. Ample free time allowed him to interact with the many Socialist and Communist workers who frequented the shop. In 1939, he joined the state Congress party, before joining the CPI a couple of years later.

VS’s exaggerated gestures and voice modulations are also the talk of the state — no mimicry show on Kerala television is complete without one demonstration of his way of speaking. He admits that he cultivated his gestures and way of speaking to attract the attention of workers who turned up for street corner meetings after backbreaking work.

VS married K. Vasumathy in 1967 and they have two children — V.A. Arunkumar and V.V. Asha, both based in Thiruvananthapuram. Perhaps the one blot in VS’s political career was an allegation of undue favours that Arunkumar was said to have received. A former bureaucrat says that he should have known when his son visited Macau eight times in five years, as his son was staying with him in his official residence. He should have asked him where he got the money for the trips. V.S., however, has dismissed the charges and asked the Oommen Chandy government to investigate them.

He is also accused of often adopting a “rigid, Stalinist” stand. His detractors point out that as an eternal activist, he campaigns on issues even before his party can formulate its position on them.

He was the first CPI(M) politician to react to police firing on tribals in Muthanga in 2003. At the age of 80, he trekked several kilometres over difficult terrain in Idukki district to protest against an attempt by some to grab a vast tract of forest land. His campaign forced the then chief minister, A.K. Antony, to declare it a national park.

Such movements won him the support of civil society movements — and were also a reason the LDF was voted to power in 2006.

After he took over as chief minister in 2006, many thought he would shed his activism. They were wrong. He sent some of his best IAS and IPS officers to remove encroachments in Kerala’s most famous tourist destination, Munnar. Before the operation wound up, the team had re-captured nearly 12,000 acres of government land and demolished many resorts and other buildings on the encroached land.

Yet VS has been criticised for the way he went about the Munnar issue. A senior leader of the Congress, who is currently a member of Parliament, says VS’s Operation Munnar was just a publicity stunt. Most of the reclaimed land was never under any dispute, he asserts, adding that many of those responsible for actual encroachments had, in fact, managed to get away. Moreover, a tribunal set up by the LDF government to hear all Munnar land cases hasn’t been able to resolve any of them so far.

Of course, VS dismisses these charges. If the Congress was so concerned why hasn’t it done anything about it even after it came back to power last year, he retorts.

But it’s not just the Congress that has flayed him for his Munnar misadventure. Says a former additional chief secretary of Kerala, “Munnar was an example of right things being done in a wrong manner. Some people had encroached upon government land and some had violated the lease conditions. But that doesn’t mean that you can walk into their property and destroy it. There are legally defined procedures to be followed.” Besides, he adds, the eviction should have been carried out by the district collector with the help of the district police force, “and not by a team hand picked by the chief minister. Also, there was no effort to dispose of the debris from the demolition, despite Munnar being an ecologically sensitive area.”

Still, VS’s activism has earned him the support of not just a staunch section of his party but of the public too. Observers believe that it was the “V.S. factor” that helped the Left gather votes in the 2011 elections. It lost power by four seats to a Congress-led front. This was no mean feat as the Kerala Assembly polls are often called the 100:40 elections — a reference to the fact that the incumbent usually gets only 40 seats, and the Opposition about 100 in almost every election. VS doesn’t want to talk about his party’s performance, or if he is unhappy about the erosion of values in the party that he helped found, nurture and sustain. Nor will he comment on the support that he enjoys in the Bengal faction of the party, though he adds that Jyoti Basu was a friend, and Biman Basu continues to be one.

He would rather look ahead. The Left, he predicts, will return to power in West Bengal in the next election. “Only the Marxists — not Mamata or the Maoists — can protect the interests of the poor,” he says. VS is ready for another fight.