Maybe it’s a quirk of irony that a task force authorised by the Kerala High Court has just begun removing land encroachments in Munnar when the tall Communist leader V.S. Achuthanandan – Comrade VS to all and sundry – turns 100 years on October 20.
A daunting mission to free Munnar of encroachments steered by him as Chief Minister in 2007 had hit the walls of opposition raised from within the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and his own party – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], which led the ruling alliance.
While the demolition drive cemented his image among the masses as a crusader against land grabbers, brickbats were not in short supply either. Writer M. Mukundan, heading the Kerala Sahitya Akademi then, unleashed a storm of sorts with a story, ‘Dinosaurukalude Kalam (The Age of Dinosaurs) portraying a dim-witted old man fondly inviting a monstrous bulldozer to raze his own hovel. Eventually, the mission stopped in its tracks. Legal debacles followed.
A stroke in 2019 slowly pulled VS away from public glare to the confines of his son’s home in Thiruvananthapuram. But he would find it amusing that there’s a fresh round of speculation and anxiety over the anti-encroachment drive in Munnar on his 100th birthday.
From someone who cut his teeth in trade union politics mobilising the peasants of Kuttanad to demand fair wages back in the early 1940s, the question of land and associated vocations has been central to VS’s political outlook.
This was what drove him to launch a struggle in 1997 against paddy land reclamation which soon drifted into what was dubbed as ‘Vettinirathal Samaram’, literally meaning a drive to ‘chop down crops’ in converted fields. A decade later, in 2008, the government helmed by VS enacted the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act.
VS rose phoenix-like from every fall he has had since his childhood near Punnapra in Alappuzha. Having lost his mother when he was just four years old and father when he was 11, VS was forced to drop out of school while in Class VII. Comrade P. Krishna Pillai recognised VS’s organisational skills when the latter was working at a coir factory in Alappuzha and sent him to work among the peasants of Kuttanad.
The Punnapra-Vayalar uprising, often called Kerala’s October Revolution, against the Travancore Diwan’s bid to self-rule and to follow the American model of governance led to a mass uprising in which VS was tasked with working underground to organise people. But he was arrested in Poonjar and subjected to the worst custodial torture at Pala police station.
It was a rollercoaster, with episodes of imprisonment, life as an undertrial activist, as a party organiser and after the turn of the millennium, as the ‘conscience keeper’ of the public. VS is one of the few surviving among the 32 Communists who walked out of the CPI in 1964 to form the CPI(M). He became the party’s State secretary in 1980 and a member of the Polit Bureau (PB) in 1985 until a fracas with Pinarayi Vijayan saw his ouster from the PB in 2009.
The years leading to the millennium saw VS, then widely viewed as a hardliner, locked in a fight with the more popular E.K. Nayanar which led to his shocking defeat in the Assembly election from Mararikulam in 1996. But the turn of the millennium saw a revitalised VS, nearing 80, undertake the seemingly impossible trek to Mathikettanshola against forest encroachment and turn combative on questions of environment conservation, anti-corruption and women’s safety.
He assiduously pursued corruption cases, one of which, the Edamalayar case, finally resulted in the conviction of the former minister K. Balakrishna Pillai.
It’s viewed that whenever VS suffered a setback within the party, he would make up for that by championing causes that endeared him to the public.
His tonal variations and the way he stretched, repeated and stressed a word or a phrase like a methodical voice artiste made him a crowd puller. His actions, often seen defiant, put the party on the defensive on many occasions such as his meeting with K.K. Rema, wife of the slain Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) leader TP Chandrasekharan in 2012.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly for some 15 years, VS, who hasn’t had high school education, was instrumental in Kerala embracing free software and introducing it in the school curriculum.
V.K. Sasidharan, his former additional private secretary who faced the axe from the party along with two other associates in 2013, recalls how VS was able to immediately get to the core of the politics of free software use after a perfunctory briefing in 2001. As Chief Minister, VS skippered the State’s growth in information technology.
On occasions, the party chose to turn its back on him when the public outcry grew shrill, forcing a rethink.
After the LDF posted a win in the 2016 Assembly polls, VS who spearheaded the campaign, was made the chairman of the State Administrative Reforms Commission. But until he retreated from public view in 2019, he would say he remained young for he never bowed to tyranny.
