Let a Hundred Flowers Doom - Sitaram Yechuri

A Tribute to Sitaram Yechury – Let a Hundred Flowers Doom!

A Critical Reflection on the Legacy of Sitaram Yechury and the CPM

The rise of Sitaram Yechury within the Communist Party of India (Marxist) represents both the internal contradictions and the gradual decline of the Indian Left. Coming from a relatively petty-bourgeois background with no significant engagement in revolutionary struggles before his student days, Yechury entered national politics through the portals of JNU, eventually becoming JNUSU President under the SFI banner. Guided by the influence of Prakash Karat and later Harkishan Singh Surjit, he climbed the party hierarchy with calculated precision—becoming a Central Committee member and, finally, General Secretary. Yet, unlike many of his predecessors who endured imprisonment, police brutality, and grassroots struggles, Yechury’s political journey was remarkably insulated from the physical sacrifices that once defined Left leadership.

Following the decision of the Allahabad High Court declaring Mrs IdiraGandhi's from Rae Bareli illegal in 1975, before the declaration of the State of Emergency in June 1975, Sitaram Yechuri asked Mrs Gandhi to resign as Prime Minister of India.  Then she was also the Visitor of the JNU.  She refused to do. later she declared the Emergency on 26 June 1975. Democratic Rights and Civil Liberties were suppressed, and thousands of people were arrested. A vast Majority of them from West Bangal where the Left movement was very strong. There is no recod Sitaram Yechuir ever arrested, let alone spent a day in a prison cell.           

This shift in leadership style stands in stark contrast to earlier stalwarts of the movement, such as Major Jaipal Singh, a freedom fighter who, along with Harkishan Singh Surjit, served on the Central Committee during the party’s formative years. Leaders of that generation combined theoretical clarity with a lifetime of sacrifice and direct confrontation with the state. Their politics were forged in struggle and revolutionary discipline, not merely in parliamentary manoeuvring or tactical alliances.

The CPM’s fateful decision to support the Congress-led UPA government in 2004 marked a turning point. Despite Congress’s unabashed commitment to neoliberal economic policies, its deepening military exercises with the United States, and closer ties with Israel, the CPM chose to lend its support under the justification of keeping the BJP at bay. The results were catastrophic. From 42 parliamentary seats in 2004, the CPM fell to 16 in 2009 and just 9 in 2014. Far from strengthening the Left, this alliance eroded its ideological distinctiveness, alienated its grassroots cadres, and associated it with the very neoliberal policies it claimed to oppose.

Yechury’s political line further reflected a retreat from Marxist-Leninist fundamentals. Critical analysis—a method first elaborated by Immanuel Kant and later adopted by thinkers like Han Suyin, the Chinese doctor and writer who defended the Cultural Revolution—demands a concrete study of concrete conditions while remaining rooted in fundamental principles. Yet, Yechury’s leadership increasingly embraced liberal rhetoric—secularism, anti-fascism, and democratic rights—without grounding it in class struggle or revolutionary praxis. His speeches rarely invoked terms like “class struggle” or referenced historic campaigns such as “Operation Burga,” instead sounding more like those of a liberal opposition leader than a Marxist revolutionary.

It is worth recalling that 14 March 1883 marked one of the saddest days for the international working-class movement: Karl Marx passed away. In reflecting on Marx’s death, Frederick Engels dismissed bourgeois democracy as an “incurable mental condition with which some people are born,” a caustic observation that underscores the chasm between revolutionary politics and the liberal democratic illusions that increasingly colour the CPM’s discourse today.

Perhaps most striking was Yechury’s decision to pay tribute to Deng Xiaoping—the architect of China’s market-oriented reforms—while failing to even mention Chairman Mao Zedong, the great revolutionary who led the Chinese people to power through Marxist-Leninist struggle. His praise for U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a figure emblematic of bourgeois liberalism, further underlined a departure from the core tenets of Marxist analysis.

Mao’s own contribution to dialectical materialism stands in stark opposition to such opportunism. Mao emphasised the supremacy of the masses over the Party, insisting that if the Communist Party—understood as the conscious vanguard of the working class—deviates from Marxist-Leninist principles, it is the duty of the masses, both party members and non-members, to organise and overthrow the errant leadership. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution embodied this principle. Far from being a Trotskyist notion of “permanent revolution,” Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a practical application of the transition of revolution, a mass mobilisation designed to purge revisionist elements like Liu Shaoqi and to reaffirm the primacy of the people in the socialist project. By calling on the masses to “bombard the headquarters,” Mao demonstrated that the revolution’s survival depends on continuous class struggle—even within the party itself.

In this light, Yechury’s silence on Mao and his open admiration for Deng and Roosevelt are not mere omissions; they are symptomatic of a worldview increasingly shaped by compromise and accommodation rather than revolutionary vigilance.

In the end, history may remember Sitaram Yechury not as a builder of movements, but as an outlier in the lineage of Indian Marxism—a leader who sought relevance through alliances and liberal posturing, but presided over the erosion of the Left’s mass base in West Bengal, Tripura, and beyond. The CPM’s entanglement in the web of neoliberal economics and its inability to develop a concrete revolutionary strategy while remaining faithful to Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao principles stands as a cautionary tale. Without theoretical rigour, grassroots mobilisation, and class clarity, even the most historic parties risk being absorbed into the very bourgeois order they were created to overthrow.

Notes

S. Deman, “To Be Marxist or to Be Communist, That Is the Question,” Times of India, April 26, 2015, Letter to the Editor.

S. Deman, “CPM Party Line of Yechury—Concrete Analysis of the Concrete?,” NewsView–RaceClass (blog), December 26, 2015.

Ibid.

Election Commission of India, Statistical Reports on General Elections (New Delhi: Election Commission, 2004–2014).

S. Deman, “CPM Party Line of Yechury.”

Han Suyin, Asia Today (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).

S. Deman, “To Be Marxist or to Be Communist.”

Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883, not 1888. See Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 473–474.

Friedrich Engels, quoted in S. Deman, “CPM Party Line of Yechury—Concrete Analysis of the Concrete?”

S. Deman, “To Be Marxist or to Be Communist.”

Ambrose Yeo-chi King, “A Voluntarist Model of Organization: The Maoist Version and Its Critique,” British Journal of Sociology 28, no. 3 (September 1977): 363–374.

Mahaparta Mohanty, “Mao’s Portrait of Stalin,” Economic and Political Weekly, July–August 1975.

S. Deman, “CPM Party Line of Yechury.”

Han Suyin, Asia Today.