Sitaram Yechury, the leader of India’s largest communist party, has died at the age of 72.
He was being treated for an acute respiratory tract infection at a Delhi hospital where he was admitted on 19 August.
Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M), was a key figure in India’s politics over several decades.
Several politicians including main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and former rival Mamata Banerjee have paid their tributes.
Yechury started his political career as a student leader with the left-wing Student Federation of India. He was arrested during the Emergency in 1975, when the Congress government led by Indira Gandhi enforced a widespread curtailment of civil liberties.
After his release, he went on to become the president of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he studied economics.
He played an especially significant role during the peak years of coalition politics, when the stability of India’s federal governments depended on bringing together disparate ideologies and priorities.
In 1996, he played a leading role in forming a coalition of 13 parties, which governed India for nearly two years with two prime ministers – HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral – sharing the tenure.
In 2004, Yechury’s party won a historic 44 seats in the parliamentary election.
The Left parties, including the CPI(M), then supported the Congress-led government from “outside” – a term used for supporting the administration without taking ministerial roles.
But in 2008, they withdrew their support as a protest against the Indo-US nuclear deal, which required India to place its civil nuclear facilities under the watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange for full civil nuclear co-operation with the United States.
The Left’s decision was controversial and seen by many as questionable as it failed to repeat its 2004 electoral success.
By the time Yechury became the CPI(M)’s general secretary in 2015, the party had lost many of its former strongholds, including West Bengal state, and its parliamentary seats were on the decline.
He was a member of the Rajya Sabha, or the upper house of parliament, from 2005 to 2017.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, with whom Yechury shared a warm relationship, called him a “friend” while paying his tribute.
“A protector of the Idea of India with a deep understanding of our country. I will miss the long discussions we used to have,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress ended the Left’s 34-year-old rule in West Bengal in 2011, called his death “a loss for national politics”.
