by Our Political Affairs Editor
The death of Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan on 21 July 2025, at the age of 101, is not merely the expiration of a centenarian statesman; it marks the terminal punctuation of a political era that had the audacity to believe in ideological purity amid an increasingly transactional polity. To canonise him simply as a veteran Communist is to profoundly misapprehend both the man and the contradictions he embodied. Achuthanandan was not a political saint, nor was he merely a dogged ideologue. He was, rather, a paradox—an embodiment of institutional loyalty and insurgent defiance cohabiting in a single, indomitable persona.
Born in the pre-independence princely state of Travancore in 1923, orphaned young and consigned to the drudgery of a coir factory, Achuthanandan entered politics not through elite academia or caste privilege, but via labour and dispossession. His political apprenticeship began with the Communist Party of India in 1940, a time when revolution was still articulated in terms of class struggle rather than electoral arithmetic. His role in the Punnapra-Vayalar uprising of 1946—where he was captured, tortured, and left for dead by the Travancore state’s armed forces—is a rarely acknowledged episode of near-martyrdom. Only by sheer chance was he saved, thanks to the intervention of a petty criminal who noticed he was still breathing. This origin in suffering became the wellspring of his absolutist worldview.
Achuthanandan was one of the 32 historic dissidents who walked out of the CPI in 1964 to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a rupture that had tectonic repercussions on the Left movement. He remained, until his death, the last surviving member of that founding cohort. Yet unlike many of his comrades who ossified into the bureaucratic routines of party life, Achuthanandan never ceased to agitate—often against his own party, sometimes in defiance of its Politburo edicts. “Once he took a position… he would not change,” a senior CPI(M) leader remarked. “He would only change… after he was convinced that the stand taken by him was wrong.” That precondition, notably, was rarely met.
During his tenure as Chief Minister of Kerala from 2006 to 2011, he embarked on what many considered an iconoclastic campaign against entrenched interests. His crackdown on encroachment in Munnar, his vociferous opposition to illegal lottery mafias, and his pursuit of justice against high-profile political figures—including R. Balakrishna Pillai—represented an unflinching exercise of state power against both corporate and political collusion. That he was not universally applauded within the CPI(M) for these endeavours reveals the deeper contradiction: Achuthanandan was a moralist in an increasingly managerial party.
Perhaps no episode captured his contentious spirit better than his visit to K.K. Rema, widow of T.P. Chandrasekharan, a slain Marxist rebel and founder of the Revolutionary Marxist Party. Despite the party’s explicit disapproval, Achuthanandan paid his respects, an act which triggered near-pariah status among CPI(M) leadership. That he would choose humanity over doctrinal loyalty is both the measure of his ethical compass and a damning commentary on his party’s diminishing ideological elasticity.
His verbal economy, often crude, could provoke both ire and admiration. Following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he infamously declared that “not even a dog would have gone to [Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s] house had it not been for his martyrdom.” The remark, roundly condemned across the political spectrum, was later retracted with the explanation that media distortion had aggravated its apparent callousness. Yet this incident unveiled a deeper trait: Achuthanandan’s rhetorical bluntness was both his strength and his liability, a refusal to perform the decorum expected in the political arena.
Internally, he was both a kingmaker and a perennial dissenter. Pinarayi Vijayan, the current chief minister and Achuthanandan’s erstwhile protégé, eventually became his most formidable adversary within the party. Their rivalry, which defined two decades of Kerala’s political dialectic, was not merely a clash of personalities but a battle over the soul of the Left. Achuthanandan represented an ascetic Marxism unwilling to compromise with electoral pragmatism; Vijayan, a technocratic, centralised model of party governance. That the CPI(M) ultimately chose the latter is indicative of the broader Left’s capitulation to neoliberal optics.
There was also the profound irony of his late-life institutionalisation. Having been sidelined from party leadership, stripped of Politburo membership, and politically isolated by 2015, Achuthanandan was resurrected in ceremonial fashion as Chairman of the Administrative Reforms Commission—a post that offered dignity without influence. It was, in effect, a gilded exile. Yet he continued to speak with startling lucidity into his nineties, delivering campaign speeches of extraordinary moral gravitas. In one instance in 2016, he compared Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign tours to the comic absurdity of the Malayalam film character Ulakam Chuttum Valiban, stating with uncharacteristic sarcasm: “Modi has swallowed all his promises and to escape from this humiliation, he is undertaking foreign tours.”
What distinguishes Achuthanandan from his cohort is not the volume of legislation he authored, nor the quantum of offices he held. It is his rare and dangerous belief that morality could be the organising principle of politics. He refused to conflate loyalty with complicity, and this made him both a revered figure among the masses and anathema within his own organisation. That he never authored a memoir or commissioned a biography may in part be because his life was, at its core, a political critique in itself—eloquent in action, austere in expression.
V.S. Achuthanandan was not a tragic figure in the Greek sense; he did not fall from great height due to hubris. Rather, he was a chronic irritant to power—power that he both held and challenged. His centenarian survival itself became an indictment of those who sought to erase him from relevance. He outlived nearly every contemporary, including his political adversaries and institutional antagonists, as if to underscore, through mere persistence, that moral clarity could endure even as structures calcified around it.
Today, with his passing, Kerala loses more than a former Chief Minister. It loses an intransigent conscience. And while many will eulogise him as a committed Marxist or tireless worker, these appellations fail to capture the subversive essence of the man. He was a disciplined rebel, an incorruptible cynic, and a moral absolutist in an age of deliberate ambiguity. One suspects he would have recoiled at the sentimentality with which his death will now be politicised. But then again, Achuthanandan never sought to be liked. He only demanded to be heard—and refused, with unrelenting consistency, to be ignored.
