Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan, the enormously popular communist titan and rebel from Kerala who helmed the state government while continuing to annoy his party leadership enough to earn suspensions from the politburo, died here on Monday. He was 101.

Through his long political career, “VS” was never shy of raising his voice — whatever the party line — against corruption, whether he was targeting a political opponent or his eternal rival in the CPM, current chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

The CPM politburo said in a statement that it was dipping its red banner in salute to Achuthanandan, the last of the 1964-born party's founding members.

The end came at a private hospital, where VS had been critically ill for the past one month, at 3.20pm.

Thousands waited hours in front of the AKG Study Centre for the arrival of the body of the man known as the Fidel Castro of Kerala, as much for his enduring popularity as for his fierce independence.

Emotions ran high as the crowd chanted slogans amid the pumping of wrists, saying: “No, no, never dead. Lal Salaam, comrade.”

His great adversary, Pinarayi, looked downcast as he led the motorcade carrying the body from the hospital to the AKG Study Centre.

Old timers recalled how relations between the two got strained after Achuthanandan’s shock defeat from the Mararikulam Assembly constituency in 1996. A win would have handed him the chief minister’s chair.

Achuthanandan had to wait another decade to earn the hot seat, in May 2006, when he was 82.

On Monday, Pinarayi described Achuthanandan as a “great communist leader” of the country.

“An era comes to an end. It is a deep loss for the party...,” the chief minister said. “This is a moment flooded with memories from decades of working closely together.”

Achuthanandan’s fight with Pinarayi cost him his politburo seat twice during his 2006-11 tenure as chief minister. In 2007, both of them were suspended for publicly bickering. They were later reinstated.

Two years later, VS was suspended again for indiscipline, this time for defying the party line that Pinarayi was innocent of the corruption charges in the SNC-Lavalin case. He suggested that Pinarayi “prove his innocence in court”.

Political analysts were caught off guard when VS compared Pinarayi to former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, a hated man for the CPM, which blamed him for the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

“The storm named Gorbachev that emerged from the great sea, the Soviet Union, finally destroyed the sea itself. Now that same storm is hitting Kerala,” VS had said.

His penchant for walking to the beat of his own drum was in evidence when he opposed the party line and demanded a CBI investigation into the murder of one of his past comrades, Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader T.P. Chandrasekharan.

Chandrasekharan, who had quit the CPM, was hacked to death, allegedly at the behest of local CPM leaders.

Born to the OBC Ezhava community on October 20, 1923, Achuthanandan had a difficult early life. He studied only till Class VII, and threw himself into the freedom movement, via trade union struggles, as a boy of 15 in 1938.

He joined the undivided Communist Party of India in 1940 while working at a British company, Aspinwall House.

Brush with death

A year before Independence, his capture for involvement in the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising against the princely state of Travancore led to brutal police torture that nearly killed him. Legend has it that a thief saved his life.

Thinking he was dead, the police allegedly wrapped him in his mundu (dhoti) and placed him under the seat of a police jeep. A thief named Kolappan, also in custody at the time, was made to assist the police.

The plan was to bury the “body” somewhere in the forest. But as the jeep drove through the night, Kolappan noticed that Achuthanandan was still breathing. He alerted the police, who took VS to hospital.

As leader of the Opposition, Achuthanandan, aged 78, would climb steep hilly terrains, braving poor weather, to push environmental policies. He fought for safeguarding forest habitats, wetlands and several ecological sites in the Western Ghats.

In 2007, he became the first communist chief minister to trek to the Sabarimala hill shrine — without any sort of physical or medical support.

The Kerala government has declared a public holiday on Tuesday, and three days of State mourning till Thursday. The national flag will be flown at half-mast on all government buildings in the state.

After a public viewing in the Durbar Hall at the secretariat on Tuesday, his body will be taken to his hometown Alappuzha in a funeral procession. The cremation is scheduled for Wednesday.

Tributes poured in from political opponents on Monday.

“V.S. Achuthanandan devoted many years of his life to public service and Kerala’s progress. I recall our interactions when we both served as chief ministers of our respective states,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

Additional reporting by PTI