Visage of struggles: The eventful life story of V S Achuthanandan, spanning over a century, coincides with Kerala's own growth story

Time of India

22-07-2025

How you die points out to how you lived. At 101 years, V S Achuthanandan fought death for 28 days. If there is one word that can define VS, it is: Struggle.
All his life he struggled for various causes, both social and political.
He had a sun-tanned visage of a weather-resilient Kuttanad farmer and seldom smiled. His speeches were often vitriolic and uttered with a trademark drawl, bordering on a Lalu kind of rustic, base humour.
He lacked an E K Nayanar kind of smiling charisma or a Jyoti Basu kind of erudite sophistication that would attract the Bhadralok, in this case the unpredictable middle class Kerala voter, who had no qualms voting en masse for Indira Gandhi in the post-Emergency polls.
But ironically, it was the intelligentsia, the erudite middle class, including women, who felt VS stood for the underdog and voted him to power on the sheer virtue of his relentless pursuit for equitable justice.
Here was a classic case where a credible voice surpassed a bulldog visage and became the conscience of Kerala from early 2000 until he was eased out by 2016.
One of the poignant moments in VS's political career was when Sitaram Yechury announced his bête noire Pinarayi Vijayan's name for the chief minister's post after the 2016 polls.
VS then said, 'VS will remain the Fidel Castro in the minds of people...'' but shared the stage with Pinarayi with a wry smile.
The biggest contribution of VS would be that he was able to build upon the VS brand successfully, especially in a state which has few role models. Even among his peers, cutting across all political parties, he would remain among few political leaders who raised the bar of humanistic values.
If VS would have been active today, there is no doubt that he would have been at the protest site of ASHAs, supporting their cause, like how he went to Munnar to support Pembilai Orumai, the women tea workers who had gone on strike demanding higher wages in 2016.
His eventful life story, spanning over a century, coincided with Kerala's own growth story, its immense socialistic achievements and search for equitable social justice.
His grand failures also provide a glimpse of how the politics of opportunism subverted foundational values of accountability, making VS brand of politics irrelevant in CPM's juggernaut.
This is not to undermine what VS managed to achieve in an 80-year political career.
His evolution from a mofussil coir factory union leader in rural Kuttanad, where his main role was to settle disputes, at times even using militant force, to a transformative leader happened only because he listened to the voice of the underdog.
VS took a bold stand against violence of all forms, which brought him in direct conflict not only with the UDF govt but even with the CPM politburo.
The acrimonious Pinarayi versus VS fights that went on for over three decades until the former had the last laugh should not be seen as just a squabble for the spoils of power, but as a deeper ideological battle.
The Pinarayi school stands for massive private investment, a la China model of development and the VS school stands for equitable distribution of wealth with minimal damages to the remaining green zones. Critics, including a section of the current CPM leadership, question the socialistic model of development and call it outdated.
Maybe that was one of the reasons that even though VS campaigned extensively in 2016 polls, the CM mantle went to Pinarayi and with it a new kind of developmental agenda.
Unlike his peers like AKG, EMS or Nayanar, VS did not come from a privileged background. He lost both his parents — mother at the age of four and father when he was 11. He said even though he cried and pleaded to God to save them, his ardent prayers were never heard and ever since then he never looked for God anywhere.
In school, he did face caste discrimination and when his classmate called him Chovan, a slur for Ezhavas, he responded by hitting his classmate with a belt.
Aggression was in his blood, but as he matured, he put it to better use and became an activist-politician, much to the chagrin of the establishment.
He barely managed to study till seventh standard and though he was good at studies, abject poverty forced him to take the job at the cloth shop run by his brother. He was part of the Punnapra-Vayalar agitation, was arrested and suffered a third-degree torture in jail.
The police dumped him, thinking he was dead.
And yet he survived to become a mass leader from Alappuzha, until the Communist Party of India split in 1964 into CPI and CPI(Marxist). VS was an integral part of 32 founding leaders who formed the CPI(M) and was the last surviving member from that group.
He faced some harsh criticism for pushing what was seen as a pastoral developmental agenda and Tughlaqian moves like cutting down banana plantations in order to protect wetlands.
Yet, post 2018 floods, his resistance to unscrupulous development and conservation of the green zone acquires real significance.
The sustainable framework of development is in sync with what many modern societies are adhering to, in order to mitigate the impact of climate change.
VS stood for the underdog and for the empowerment of women much before it became a fashionable statement. No wonder women formed a solid vote base, even when the establishment wanted to get rid of him.
VS was also a shrewd politician using the mass media to his advantage to build the VS brand, in a state that had few political heroes to look up to. He took the television crew traversing through high ranges of Idukki, to destroy hundreds of acres of poppy crops.
He fought for women's justice, green issues, communal agendas and dreamed of a society based on equitable distribution of wealth.
VS was an atheist, but he loved Bhagavad Gita, which he read several times, and was an avid yoga practitioner. Is he a misnomer in the current context of water-tight ideologies of Left and Right, where corruption is overlooked in the name of development?
Maybe. The best political legacy that VS perhaps leaves behind would be what he failed to achieve, rather than what he sought to destroy. In that constant struggle from darkness to light lies his relevance.