Alappuzha in central Kerala, with its sprawling backwaters, lush paddy fields, and swaying coconut palms, hardly seems like a place where poverty and destitution once cast such a long shadow. Yet, during the 1940s, the devastation wrought by the Second World War, coupled with the apathy of the royal government of erstwhile Travancore, plunged its people into the depths of famine, starvation and death.
But Alappuzha was also the cradle of the nascent trade union movement and the emerging Communist Party of India, which had already begun instilling courage in the hearts of the oppressed. This culminated in the legendary Punnapra-Vayalar uprising, when the downtrodden rose in arms against the oppressive Travancore State. Poor villagers, armed with nothing more than spears fashioned from sharpened palm fronds, were gunned down by the Travancore army. Hundreds perished under a hail of bullets.
The uprising remains etched in Kerala’s collective memory as a testament to the indomitable will of ordinary people. They may have been called foolhardy, but never cowards. They refused to barter their dignity for mere survival. The memorial raised in honour of the martyrs of Punnapra-Vayalar continues to be one of the most revered monuments for Kerala’s communists.
Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan, who passed into history at the age of 101, was born into one of these impoverished families in Punnapra. His political baptism was forged in the fire of this very uprising. Following the rebellion and the repression unleashed on the villagers by the police and landlords, VS went underground, only to be arrested, tortured and left for dead. It is no surprise then that his entire life and political journey were defined — and continually fuelled — by the never-say-die spirit ignited in Punnapra-Vayalar, a spirit he carried unwaveringly even in the face of near-certain defeat.
On July 23, the vehicle carrying his body took 22 hours to cover the 150 kilometres from Thiruvananthapuram to Alappuzha as mammoth crowds braved heavy showers to line the route and shout slogans to pay their last respects — this was streamed live by every television channel without commercial breaks — before he was laid to rest alongside the martyrs of the 1946’s Punnapra-Vayalar uprising who were buried in a mass grave by the Travancore Police. A rare sight in an age of instant amnesia for a centenarian politician who had faded from public view six years ago.
He was no ideologue like E.M.S. Namboodiripad, nor a magnetic mass leader like A.K. Gopalan. He also lacked the earthy humour of E.K. Nayanar. Yet, one could argue that even these communist titans did not command the universal affection and reverence that Achuthanandan eventually did, not just within the party but also far beyond its ideological boundaries.
Born into a deprived Ezhava (other backward class) family, orphaned in his teens, and forced to drop out after Class VII, VS began his working life as a coir factory labourer in a British-owned unit in Alappuzha. After starting as a trade unionist, he joined the CPI at 17. Elected the CPI’s district secretary in Alappuzha in the 1950s, he rose to its national leadership in his late thirties. One among the 32 members of the CPI national council who walked out to form Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 1964, VS was its state secretary in the turbulent 1980s and later a Politburo member.
And the irony was profound: his rise to cult-hero status came not in the fervent prime of his life but in its twilight. Once derided as a dour Stalinist, rigid and sectarian, the battle-scarred veteran reinvented himself in his seventies into a moral crusader. He began to campaign against corruption at high places, not just in rival parties but even within his own. He hit the streets against atrocities on women. He climbed hills — even during his eighties — to drive out encroachers, marched in the rain, waged court battles, and turned every front into a moral battleground.
Backed by some young advisers, this school dropout rallied against the environmental threats posed by the nuclear plant in Kudankulam in Kanyakumari, opposed the discriminatory provisions of the World Trade Organisation and championed free software. This writer vividly remembers VS in his house, clad in a lungi and sleeveless baniyan and aided by interpreters, intensely absorbed in discussions with the free software evangelist, Richard Stallman. He was the first mainstream politician to have raised questions of micro politics along with macro concerns. When his party faltered, he led the charge alone. When it tried to humiliate him, the people rose in protest.
The 1990s saw Achuthanandan opening a war front within the party against its formidable leadership, which he found was faltering from the core values of the movement. But, gradually, the ideological differences curdled into a bitter power struggle driven by personal and factional interests. Marginalised by the dominant faction, VS was defeated in the 1996 assembly elections to deny him the chief ministership; it was engineered by his party rivals. This was the proverbial straw. Like a wounded tiger, he launched a no-holds-barred counter-offensive, aided by his then protégé, Pinarayi Vijayan, the present chief minister. A vengeful VS ensured that by the end of the 1990s, the entire top brass of his powerful rivals was eliminated from party committees.
But, as with most power struggles, the wheel soon turned. The mentor-protégé relationship collapsed, opening yet another round of internal feuding, which eventually turned out to be the bitterest in history. It witnessed mutual accusations, ousters from the Politburo, electoral snubs, and open defiance. In 2006 and again in 2011, the CPI(M)’s central leadership denied VS tickets, only to backtrack under public outrage fuelled by media uproar, a first incident of its kind in the party’s history.
In 2006, VS became the chief minister at 83, leading crackdowns on land mafias, illegal lotteries, and corrupt officials, often with resistance from within his cabinet. However, by then, Vijayan had consolidated himself inside the party with the backing of the central leadership, even as VS continued to be the popular hero outside the party. Thanks to the age of 24-hour TV, which amplified public sympathy for him, VS managed to remain within the CPI(M) — unlike many stalwarts like Nripen Chakraborty, Somnath Chatterjee, M.V. Raghavan or K.R. Gowri, all of whom were expelled for defying party discipline during the twilight of their stormy lives.
VS was not untouched by power politics. His battles were not always free from personal ambition. Yet, even when outmanoeuvred by rivals, VS remained, in public imagination, the conscience of Kerala’s Left. The media, which thrives on stereotyping, framed the contrast as a moral binary — VS as the embodiment of integrity and Vijayan as cunning and ruthless.
There is yet another aspect that secures VS a unique place in the history of Indian communism. For a movement that long claimed to represent the working class and the oppressed, it took over half a century to elevate a true subaltern to the post of chief minister. It was Achuthanandan who finally shattered that symbolic glass ceiling in a party often criticised as being Brahminical and dominated by
the bhadralok.
M.G. Radhakrishnan, a journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram, has worked with various print and electronic media organisations