From the India Today archives (2016) | V.S. Achuthanandan: Return of the angry old man

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated May 9, 2016)
Comrade ‘VS’ is on the move. Close to midnight in a town in north Kerala, a frail figure in baggy blue track pants, blue sweatshirt and Nike trainers paces down the shiny tiled corridor of the shuttered district court. Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan, who turns 93 this October, owes his longevity to an austere diet and fitness routine he has followed for decades. When the walk is over, his police bodyguards beam a torchlight on to the dirt track leading back to his night halt, the forest inspection bungalow in Mananthavady, in the state’s northern Wayanad district.
For the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front coalition in Kerala, Achuthanandan is the torchbearer and star campaigner. He is an anachronism even for a party known for its long-lived comrades. Jyoti Basu, 96; H.K.S. Surjeet, 92; E.M.S. Namboodiripad, 87; E.K. Nayanar, 85, they were all semi-retired in their final days. But for V.S. Achuthanandan, chief minister between 2006 and 2011, every day takes him closer to a possible second term. (He’s recently embraced social media too, Facebook and Twitter, reportedly at party chief Sitaram Yechury’s say so.)
His faculties undimmed by age, he contemplates the next day’s campaign, one among nearly 60 whirlwind poll meetings across the state ahead of the May 16 elections. As he walks, his mind whirs with punchlines and the local issues that will figure in his speech.
These are crucial polls for the Left. In Kerala, at least, they have scented victory. Huge posters of Achuthanandan and politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan and the red hammer-and-sickle flags are arrayed along the national highways. The BJP’s tie-up with the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), a party of the state’s powerful backward Ezhava community, has triangulated contests across the state and marks the debut of explicit caste politics in Kerala. The Ezhavas are an LDF support base (both VS and Vijayan are Ezhavas), but, like all other state parties, they do not openly solicit caste votes. This political uncertainty makes VS-the LDF’s sole crowd-puller-crucial to ensure the Left gets past the 71-seat mark to form government in the 140-seat assembly.
The CPI(M)’s heavy artillery goes into battle in a white Skoda saloon. The hammer and sickle flag flutters on the bonnet as the car churns a sea of excited people in Mananthavady, VS’s first engagement for the day. A feeble figures ascends the stage. The transformation that follows, as his hands rest on the hammer-and-sickle-shaped podium, is electrifying. He reminds the audience of the LDF’s last five-year term, marked by low levels of corruption. “I am that V.S. Achuthaaaanandan,” he tells them. The audience roars. He is a wizened but crafty Yoda unsheathing his weapon, the VS light saber if you will. It drags out one crucial word in each sentence to emphasise a point.
The VS light saber touches on the names of political rivals to generate the kind of searing political satire Malayalees would happily pay to watch. “Ooooomen Chandy….”, “Narendra Moooooooady”. The crowd erupts again. In the course of his fiery 20-minute speech, VS looks skywards, rocks his head to emphasise a point and invokes his enemies. After he has metaphorically beaten them all to pulp, he sits down, has a glass of tender coconut water and, even as party candidate O.R. Kelu continues speaking, leaves the venue. The impact is instantaneous. The crowd melts away faster than a block of ice in the blazing noon day Kerala sun.
The VS convoy moves on to Marakadavu village, hit by a severe water crisis, and lined by rows of drought-hit pepper trees. Nightie-wearing women thump the windows of his car, children press their faces against it, the kind of adulation that even Malayalam movie stars don’t get. VS emerges and walks to a plastic chair lined with a towel. He is welcomed with a glass of coconut water. A microphone is passed on to him. The VS light saber is drawn again.
“Oooomen Chandy has not visited this place even once?,” he thunders. The VS speeches are directly proportional to the size of the audience. At his next pit stop, Sultan Bathery, he calls Prime Minister Modi “ulagam sutrum valiban (one who travels the world)”, the name of an old, popular MGR film. “He visits India occasionally.”
THE LATE BLOOMER
The V.S. Achuthanandan story is by now the stuff of folklore. Born in 1923 in a dirt-poor family in the state’s Alappuzha district, he lost both parents by the time he was 11 and dropped out of school to support himself. (He never felt the poverty, he once remarked, since everyone around him was so poor.)
VS joined the Communist Party at the age of 14. He was jailed during the freedom movement but his rise to prominence only came much later, in 1980 when he became CPI(M) state secretary during E.K. Nayanar’s chief ministership. VS was seen as a crude apparatchik lost in the shadow of towering stalwarts like EMS and Nayanar. Kerala’s political pendulum, oscillating between the Congress and the Left, also cheated him of a few chances to be CM. Finally, around 2001, the rebranding of VS as a mass leader began: someone who could take on issues like deforestation and the threat of the land mafia. His exaggerated speaking style was quickly picked up by the boom in Malayalam news programming. They were now part of the “Achumama” (uncle Achu) repertoire. When the party was swept to power in 2006 and VS, age 83, finally became CM, it was a pyrrhic victory. He had the government but the party, and its key ministers, were in the iron grip of state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan, 72. The battles between VS and his erstwhile political understudy were so public and vicious that the joke goes that the veteran leader functioned as both CM and leader of the opposition. Public protests forced the CPI(M) to renominate VS in the next election. A five-year spell in the opposition has only cemented his hold over the public imagination.
VS’s sharpest barbs are reserved for those who raise the topic of his age. In 2014, he dismissed Rahul Gandhi as “Amul baby” when the latter crossed the line. The VS fan base, however, is unaffected by their idol’s advancing years. “I’ve wanted to see VS ever since I saw his political speeches on TV four years ago,” says Nanditha, a precocious 13-year-old schoolgirl patiently waiting for an audience with VS in the ante room of the guesthouse.
“The people of Kerala believe a Communist leader should be spartan, a man of integrity and devoted like EMS. VS is so popular because he is the last living link to leaders of a bygone era,” says Thiruvananthapuram-based political analyst A. Jayashanker. “VS takes up issues like the environment and women’s rights which are outside the ambit of most political parties,” says Marxist historian K.N. Panikkar.
Behind the speeches and the political theatre is a politician with a rigid emphasis on ideals. He opposed a potentially lucrative alliance with the Indian Union Muslim League because its leader P.K. Kunhalikutty was embroiled in a corruption case. He wanted his own party to condemn the brutal 2012 killing of T.P. Chandrasekharan, an ex-partyman killed by CPI(M) workers for floating a rebel outfit.
And despite his earlier hardline avatar, he was the first one to support the CPI(M) alliance with the Congress in the West Bengal assembly polls. The Pinarayi factionists opposed it, fearing its impact on the Kerala polls. Now, VS feels vindicated. The alliance was necessary, a survival strategy he says, because “Mamata Banerjee’s TMC was beating and killing our party workers”. He does not rule out a similar alliance in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. “What we are running now is an experiment… if it succeeds, then I am sure the victorious sides would like to repeat it in 2019.”
The rivalry with CM Oommen Chandy is now purely personal. The gloves came off in 2014 after the vigilance department booked VS’s son V.K. Arun Kumar, ex-director of Coirfed, an association of coir making companies, for irregularities in the 2007 construction of a warehouse for Rs 47 lakh. VS is also
not averse to the occasional low blows. “Mukhya prathi (prime accused)… Saritha Chandy,” he says, juxtaposing the name of Saritha Nair, (a co-accused in the solar sex-and-favours scam) with CM Chandy.
YECHURY’S DILEMMA
One of CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury’s biggest dilemmas on May 19 is going to be: who to appoint as CM in case of an LDF victory: the party’s mass face or Vijayan, the relatively younger arch-rival.
A temporary truce between the two is currently on but it is not known if it will hold after the results are out. The size of the victory will dictate the choice of CM. But one scenario being discussed in the corridors of party headquarters AKG Centre in Thiruvananthapuram is a ‘one-four’: VS serves for a year as CM after which he gracefully concedes the remainder of the tenure to his rival, Vijayan. Repeatedly asked about who will be CM if the LDF wins, VS says “the party will decide”. But he betrays an inscrutable hint of what could be in store. He repeatedly speaks of “my government” when talking about the planned clean-up post-May 19. Clearly, the old warhorse is not ready to ride into the sunset just yet.
—with Jeemon Jacob
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