OBITUARY: Sitaram Kept the Conversation Going

Sitaram Yechury was a brilliant student of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He quickly moved from student activism in JNU, where he was thrice the students’ union president, to full-time party activism. He swiftly rose up the highest echelons of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), and was closely drawn into the discussions on the strategy and tactics of the Left in an environment that had seen not only the erosion of single party dominance, but also challenges faced by the Left in growing its electoral base. He was the Party’s leading intellectual, going on to author several books and articles on democracy, secularism and the Constitution, while concentrating on building up a wider coalition of political parties in order to defend the secular-democratic nature of the republic, despite the apparent contradictions within and among Opposition formations.