Sitaram Yechury, Publisher

Much about Comrade Sitaram Yechury (1952-2024) is publicly well-known – the beginnings of his public life in the students’ movement; his leadership of the Students’ Federation of India and the JNU students’ movement; his imprisonment during the Emergency; his joining, and subsequent rapid ascent in the Communist Party of India (Marxist); his engagements with the international communist movement; his role in bringing together secular parties to forge a broad front against the fascistic, Hindutva-obsessed RSS-BJP; his outstanding contributions as a parliamentarian; his expertise in economics coupled with his fine application of the Marxist method to the analysis of the Indian reality, particularly to understanding caste and communalism.

What is not so well known is that Comrade Sitaram was one of the founding directors and member of the Editorial Advisory Board at LeftWord Books. From the start of LeftWord Books in 1999, he had been an advocate of the work we have been doing. Along with Prakash Karat, N. Ram, Aijaz Ahmad, Prabhat Patnaik, Indira Chandrasekhar, V.K. Ramachandran and P. Govinda Pillai, Comrade Sitaram was an active participant in the meetings of the Editorial Advisory Board. He would read proposals and comment on them; he would propose ideas for new projects we could pursue; he would give feedback on books we published. Above all, his presence meant that the meetings would be full of humour, good cheer and optimism.

Sadly for us, he stepped down from being a director of the company after he became a member of parliament. This was because he himself had raised the issue of conflict of interest when parliamentarians owned or led private companies. This was particularly galling, he argued, if they also wormed their way into parliamentary committees that oversaw the sectors that overlapped with their business interests. Even though Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns the LeftWord imprint, was minuscule as compared to giant conglomerates that operated across, say, aviation, liquor, media, and sports, it was for him a matter of principle that as a parliamentarian he should not be seen as having private business interests, even though he had never been paid by the company nor derived any pecuniary advantage from it.

He continued his association with LeftWord Books informally, and advised us on our editorial direction and about the gaps in our vision as we developed over the years. He would read our books regularly and give us important feedback on them.

On his desk, after his death, we found that Comrade Sitaram had several LeftWord titles that he had been reading.

The escalation of Hindutva within Indian society was closely tracked by Comrade Sitaram. He wrote several important articles that revealed the fascistic character of this movement in the 1980s, articles that were later published as What is This Hindu Rashtra?: On Golwalkar's Fascistic Ideology and the Saffron Brigade's Practice (1993). Subsequently, Comrade Sitaram built a body of work – articles and short booklets – on the theme of the Hindu Right, trying to understand its ideological and institutional character as well as its relationship to Indian liberalism.

Over the past few years, Comrade Sitaram had been talking to us about doing a fuller version of What is This Hindu Rashtra?, updated beyond 1993 to include the rise of Narendra Modi and the BJP alliance to power in Delhi. We had hoped to encourage him to get the project done in 2025, after the conclusion of his final term as General Secretary of the CPI(M), but alas, that book will not be published. Instead, we will bring out a collection of his writings on communalism, which would have been the anchor of the book that he had planned. 

– Sudhanva Deshpande and Vijay Prashad

Image: Comrade Sitaram releasing the bilingual edition of The Communist Manifesto on 15 March 2019, to mark twenty years of LeftWord Books. Others in the photo (L to R): Sudhanva Deshpande, Prakash Karat, Subhashini Ali.