Remembering Sitaram Yechury: The Unfinished Questions of Our Time

On Sitaram Yechury’s death anniversary, I find myself thinking not only about the political leader we lost, but also about the intellectual and political tradition he represented.

For me, Yechury’s understanding of India, democracy and secularism was particularly important. He was a committed communist, but his politics was never detached from the constitutional and plural character of India. He understood that the Indian reality could not be reduced to one religion, one identity or one political imagination.

I have always found his reading of Jawaharlal Nehru interesting. Yechury recognised in Nehru an attempt to build India as a plural, secular and democratic republic, while also placing socialism and economic justice within the project of nation-building. His own politics emerged from a different historical tradition, but he understood the importance of protecting the democratic and secular foundations of the Republic.

His position on religion and the state was equally clear. Religion, he argued, is fundamentally a matter of individual faith and belief. But when religion is turned into an instrument of political power, and when the state begins to identify itself with one particular religion, the very meaning of a secular constitutional democracy is weakened.

This question has become even more important in our time. The inauguration of the Ram temple by the Prime Minister in 2024, and the broader political use of religious symbolism, made the relationship between religion, state and politics a central question once again. Yechury’s insistence that the state should neither profess nor patronise any particular religion remains deeply relevant.

What I also remember about Yechury is that his politics was internationalist. He was not a communist only in an Indian context; he remained connected to the wider international communist and progressive movement. He understood that the crises of our time—economic inequality, growing concentration of wealth, ecological destruction and the consequences of neoliberal capitalism—cannot be addressed merely through electoral politics.

He continued to believe that socialism had to remain a political alternative to capitalism. Whether one agrees with every aspect of that political tradition or not, there is something important in refusing to accept the present order as inevitable.

For me, Yechury’s legacy therefore lies in this combination: a commitment to socialism without abandoning democracy; a commitment to secularism without denying faith; and a commitment to political struggle without losing sight of India’s constitutional and plural character.

At a time when political discourse is becoming increasingly polarised and intolerant, his insistence on dialogue, constitutionalism, secularism and democratic values feels particularly significant.