AIKS Dips Its Red Flag in Honour of Comrade VS

The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) mourns the passing away of Comrade VS Achuthanandan, 101, a legendary freedom fighter, former chief minister of Kerala and a veteran Communist leader who was a hero in the glorious Punnapra Vayalar struggle. Apart from being CM for one term, Comrade VS had a stellar innings as three term opposition leader in the Kerala assembly. He was a former member of the Politbureau Member of the CPI(M) and Secretary of the CPI(M) Kerala state committee.

Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan was born on October 20, 1923 in Punnapra, Alappuzha, to Sankaran and Accamma. He lost his mother when he was 4 years old and subsequently lost his father aged 11. This forced him to quit his studies after finishing 7th standard in school. His childhood was punctuated with the economic horrors of great depression. This, as he recalled later, would instill a ferocious anti-imperialism in VS. Alappuzha was the epicentre of the modern working-class movement in Travancore. VS was drawn to the communist party by the advanced proletarian elements in 1940 when he was a worker in the Aspinwall company. Com P Krishnapillai, the ace organiser of the communist party in Kerala, identified the talent in VS and he was sent to Kuttanad to organise the predominantly Dalit and backward caste agricultural workers. This assignment saw a concrete application of Marxism-Leninism in organising socially and economically suppressed agricultural workers and poor peasants against landlords and a repressive state.

His participation in post war revolutionary upsurge— Punnapra Vayalar—was legendary. His involvement in militant revolutionary activities after independence led him to face the wrath of bourgeois-landlord state apparatus. The brutal torture that he had to undergo in police lockup made him deeply sensitive about the ruling class violence on working people in general and rural proletariat in particular. Com.VS would militantly resist state violence through-out his political life.

VS was elected to the State Committee of the united Communist Party in 1956 and to its National Council in 1958. He was the last of the surviving 32 members of the National Council who left to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He served as the Secretary of the Kerala State Committee of the CPI(M) from 1980 to 1991. He was elected to the Central Committee of the Party in 1964 and became a member of the Polit Bureau in 1985. He was relieved from the Central Committee, of which he had become a Special Invitee, due to age, in 2022.

VS was elected to the Kerala assembly for seven terms. He served as Leader of Opposition for three terms where he stridently took up public causes like environmental protection, gender equality, wetland conservation, better pay for nurses, transgender rights, and free software. He was the Chief Minister from 2006 to 2011 and his tenure was marked by several legislative and administrative measures for the welfare of the working people.

Com.VS was organically linked to the revolutionary peasant movement. His writings and speeches detailed the ways in which peasantry is looted by neo-colonialism. He led the working class and peasantry in Kerala when neoliberal reforms were introduced. His trenchant critique of liberalisation policies in agriculture including “free trade” proved to be incisive in Kerala’s political economy. Deeply concerned with ecological questions, VS consistently pointed the corporate greed to commodify nature. His tenure as chief minister of Kerala (2006-11) saw creative interventions in agrarian political economy. The violently executed liberalisation policies by the successive Congress and BJP led union governments resulted in severe agrarian distress and farm suicides. Com.VS led LDF government initiated a Debt Relief Commission which would provide considerable succour to the peasantry. This was a pioneering model for the entire country. His tenure also witnessed favourable policies for paddy cultivation with the best procurement support price in the country. The administrative measures and his political ideological struggles exposed the bankruptcy of neoliberalism. As a lifelong organiser of cooperatives, VS in his last years passionately wrote about the need to reorganise cooperatives as a bulwark against big business exploitation of the peasantry.

In his passing, the revolutionary peasant and agricultural workers’ movement has lost its North Star and to fill the vacuum left by VS will undoubtedly be an uphill task.

AIKS dips the Red Banner in honour of VS and extends its deepest condolences to his wife, K. Vasumathy, their two children, daughter V.V. Asha and son V. A. Arun Kumar, and their grandchildren.

Sd/-

Ashok Dhawale
President

Vijoo Krishnan
General Secretary