VS Achuthanandan had a knack for rubbing the party honchos the wrong way and getting away with it. Not many could expect how he pushed his luck with a disciplinarian organisation. He played well while it lasted and retreated to an honourable corner of power when he found the ground support waning.

Achuthanandan's revolutionary past and crowd-pulling antics helped him counter his younger challengers in the CPM at the pinnacle of his career. Having lost the chief ministership by a whisker in 1996, he worked overtime to steer Kerala's mainstream politics to hitherto ignored territories. Of course, his party was in power. He couldn't care less.

He trekked mountains to highlight the scale of forest encroachment and went about exposing corruption scandals and organised crime against women. The vulnerable sections looked up to him as a saviour. He was dubbed the real opposition leader, a man beyond partisan politics.

Achuthanandan's strategy shift was significant. He knew he had to find support outside the party to stay relevant. Once known as a communist hardliner and a stickler for party discipline, Achuthanandan appealed to the larger masses at the cost of the party.

Simultaneously, he tried to cut to size his detractors within the party. He had an army by his side, composed of loyal satraps and efficient strategists. Yet he knew that the rivals were closing in. In 2006, he found himself reduced to a star campaigner within the party. The CPM was almost sure of winning the election, but the party forum decided against fielding Achuthanandan as a candidate.

The veteran had the last laugh, though. Riding a wave of public sympathy, he compelled the party to reassess its strategy and was sworn in as the chief minister. 

Crown of thorns
Ironic as it might sound, Achuthanandan's elevation as the chief minister further undermined his position within the CPM. The veteran was reduced to a shadow of his former self as the firebrand opposition leader. The CPM honchos portrayed their own government as a failure and sought the chief minister's head to salvage their image. 

Achuthanandan found himself isolated within the party when the state unit elected its new organisation at the biennial conference held in Kottayam. If the veteran was a force to reckon with at the previous conference held in Malappuram, he was cornered in Kottayam. Achuthanandan's detractors won Malappuram only because of last-minute defections and liberal support from the party politburo. His authority was drastically reduced two years later.

Achuthanandan faced harsh criticism at the state conference held in Kottayam. Thanks to his government's tough stand against land grabbers, he found little support among his former loyalists in Idukki and Ernakulam.

Achuthanandan's campaign managers were systematically cut away from the scene, leaving the veteran to fight his own battle.

The dominant faction of the CPM could do little to buy the veteran's silence. Achuthanandan played his cards well by exposing intra-party rivalries to the public glare, a strategy that was unthinkable to his detractors.

He timed his public attacks carefully. He criticised the party's decisions just as the party was about to face crucial elections to the Kerala Legislative Assembly. His opponents within the party were forced to let him have his way because they could not deny his public image as a messiah of sorts.

Achuthanandan deserves credit for leading the party to victory in 2006 and putting up a neck-and-neck fight with the opposition UDF in 2011.

Unrelenting rebel
By the end of his term as chief minister, it was clear that Achuthanandan may not be given another chance. The party honchos even announced that the veteran was too weak to face an election. In his characteristic stubborn way, Achuthanandan hit back by suggesting that the party could not expect to cash in on his image as a vote-puller.

“Since the party has declared me unhealthy, I might invite disciplinary measures if I went out to campaign,” he told party colleagues at the state committee, half in jest. 

He said that the people were not convinced about the party's public posturing in several matters. He said that the party should at least show a semblance of implementing its policies. 

Achuthanandan's crusading spirit positioned him against his perceived allies. He did not mind rubbing off alliance partner CPI, which raised a hue and cry over the government's demolition drive in Munnar and its surroundings in 2010. Achuthanandan was also motivated by a desire to get even with the CPI ministers handling key portfolios of revenue and forest, who sought to contradict him in the Legislative Assembly. 

An expulsion from the politburo in 2009 hardly helped contain Achuthanandan's rebelliousness. He kept his bête noire, Pinarayi Vijayan, on tenterhooks even after the party vowed to fight the Lavalin case legally and politically.

Baying for blood
He put his own party colleagues in the shadow on various issues, including the Lavalin case, ADB loans, the “fourth-world” ideological controversy, and most recently, the eviction drive on the Munnar hills. Much more damaging were his statements on the murder of former comrade TP Chandrasekharan on the eve of an assembly byelection.

Achuthanandan did not hang up his boots even after Pinarayi Vijayan was sworn in as chief minister in 2016. Rehabilitated as the head of an administrative reforms commission, he raked up the murder case by supporting Chandrasekharan's wife KK Rema's demand for a CBI probe. Though he was censured by the party's state committee, he sent a letter to the chief minister with a similar demand within a fortnight.

Though the party reeled under its own leader's charges, civil society warmed up to the dissident communist. Yet he found his grip on the organisation constantly weakening as Pinarayi Vijayan rose to become the party's undisputed leader.

Pinarayi emerged victorious from a bitter fight with Achuthanandan. Although the politburo was forced to expel both leaders from the top decision-making body in 2009, citing indiscipline, Pinarayi was gradually reinstated. Achuthanandan was kept waiting.