V S Achuthanandan, the last of the 32 comrades who broke away from the CPI National Council in 1964 to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is no more. Death just about managed to befriend the most uncompromising and unyielding political leader Kerala has ever seen. He was 101.  

Many attribute Achuthanandan's uptight and unflinching manners to his severe childhood. He had lost his parents at a very young age, and had dropped out of school to work in his elder brother's tailoring shop. Knowing that he was good at studies, the elder brother used to regularly provide him Communist pamphlets as if that could make up for his younger brother's lost lessons. Achuthanandan turned out to be a voracious reader. Non-fiction was what he preferred.

A source recalled how Achuthanandan had given some Left economists, including T M Thomas Isaac, a hard time asking them to somehow get French economist Thomas Piketty's seminal work “Capital in the Twenty-First Century' translated into Malayalam. He was then the opposition leader. So impatient was Achuthanandan that he is said to have then asked a journalist to at least translate a couple of important chapters for him.   

If childhood experiences steeled him, the devouring of Communist literature solidified his convictions. Realising how firm his commitment to Communist ideals was, the legendary P Krishnapillai, Achuthanandan's hero, asked the young unsmiling man to give regular classes to poor farmers and coir workers.  

He took up this assignment with a nerd's single-minded focus. He pestered his leaders, including Krishnapillai, to break down arcane Marxian tenets for him and he would then explain those to illiterate coir and farm labourers in a manner that is said to have caused a lot of excitement among the listeners. Like a kindergarten teacher with an extended lilt, he lingered on a syllable, or stretched it, when he tried to explain finer points of socialism to the uninitiated farmers. The style stayed with him for the rest of his life. He also had a way of keeping his chin up. Once, at a press conference, he was asked why. "Don't you see that I am a short man. Comrade Krishnapillai had told me to always look people in the eyes, particularly policemen. In my days, policemen were not just cruel; they were also very tall. Since these policemen of those days had this dirty habit of always coming before me, my head always has an upward tilt," he said with a satisfied laugh.  

The young lad became so popular that leaders like A K Goplan began to use him to mobilise people for party work. From his callow youth, he was a determined fighter who apparently did not know fear. He was jailed many times and was subjected to the worst forms of torture. Once, policemen tied his hands and legs and lifted him to a wooden bar just below the ceiling, leaving him hanging like a plantain bunch. The policemen then stood below and pierced holes in his soles. It is said even then he had his lips defiantly stretched tight and wide as if he was about to say 'go to hell'. 

 Achuthanandan was too orthodox a communist to condone what the likes of him called the CPI's right-wing deviations, especially their pro-West stand, under S A Dange. It was only natural for him to walk out of the National Executive in 1964, knowing fully well it could be the end of the political road for this small band of ultra-orthodox but hugely popular communists. As it turned out, the CPM led by A K G and E M S Namboodirippad emerged stronger. Even EMS had famously acknowledged that it was Achuthanandan's iron-fisted control of the party in the eighties that eventually tilted the scales in the CPM's favour. 

As the party secretary (from 1980 to 1992), Achuthanandan was a strict disciplinarian in the Stalinist mould. His uncompromising, some say even “heartless”, ways had alienated him from even party workers. He cut to size anyone who put forward concepts he thought were a deviation from Left principles. Nuclear scientist M P Parameshwaram, who propounded the Fourth World Theory, was one such victim.  

MP's Fourth World thesis was an attempt to shake up what was then seen as Leftist lethargy. He argued that political and economic centralism were the undoing of the Soviet Union. Achuthanandan saw red, called Parameshwaran a revisionist, and ensured he was expelled. 

Achuthanandan is said to have hated movies, but he had the anti-hero's penchant for extreme solutions. When widespread conversion of paddy lands was hurting the ecology, an issue he took up in a more humane way as Chief Minister, Achuthanandan exhorted party workers in 1996 to cut down rubber plantations. This was right after he was upset by Congress's P J Francis in Mararikulam in the 1996 Assembly polls by a margin of less than 2,000 votes. Achuthanandan was convinced that he was back-stabbed. It was also the second and the last time he lost an election; he lost in his first attempt in 1965. 

The anti-reclamation stir, derisively called the 'vettinirathal samaram' ('cut to size' movement), became so unpopular that Achuthanandan himself had to call off the agitation. The 'vettinirathal samaram' is also said to be one of the reasons why the LDF failed to hold on to power in 2001. 

But the year also marked the start of a new phase in Achuthanandan's career. A member of his staff remembers what Achuthanandan first told them. “I don't want to be an opposition leader who routinely churns out press releases. I want to be where the victims are and I want to work tirelessly for them,” Achuthanandan declared his vision statement.  

What followed was a fallen comrade's unstoppable rise as a superhuman. Achuthanandan championed human-interest causes like no other political leader has ever done. With a vigilante's zeal he took on the corrupt, the rapists and those who violated the environment. It was not just UDF leaders like P K Kunhalikutty and R Balakrishnan Pillai who felt the heat. Even his own party members, most notably his once-protege Pinarayi Vijayan, fell victim to his cleansing spree. He took Pinarayi to court for alleged corruption in the SNC-Lavalin deal, triggering what was then seen as a “self-annihilating” faction war within the CPM. 

Achuthanandan gradually lost absolute control over the party, but curiously, by then, he emerged as Kerala's biggest hope. In 2006, it was his leadership that swept the LDF to power with nearly 100 seats. Achuthanandan was suddenly seen as someone considerably bigger than the sum total of his own party. Achuthanandan was the CPM, and what the CPM was not was the party led by state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan. VS  embodied the unsullied communist ideal. He floated above like an extra judicial power, untouched by party commands. He himself was his own command. He used his mass power to emasculate the official party.  

The CPM, although reportedly reluctant, had no choice but to appoint him as the chief minister. But the party made sure that he was not granted unbridled power.  Home and Vigilance were kept out of bounds for him. Yet, Achuthanandan did enough damage. He embarked on perhaps the most ambitious cleaning-up drive Kerala had ever seen: the Munnar operation that saw wealthy resorts on encroached land pulled down by growling JCBs.  

Even at 92, during the 2016 Assembly elections, he was still the CPM's mascot. It seemed that even age could not daunt him. A few days before he was first admitted to the hospital in a serious condition, in early 2020, VS was seen addressing a large election gathering, canvassing votes for the CPM candidate V K Prasanth for the Vattiyoorkavu byelection, the operatic 'rubber band'-stretch of his carefully chosen words hitting the opposition where it hurt the most. "Read Piketty and you will understand why the economic policies of the fascist Modi are leading to shocking concentration of wealth in the hands of just a few. This Modi chap has copied all of what he knows about economics from the Congress scoundrels," he was heard saying. 

Finally, he had only death to fight. And he kept fighting, as much as only Achuthanandan can.