AA Edit | An Icon Passes In Kerala

The rate of social and economic change Kerala has witnessed in the last two centuries is unparalleled. It moved from a feudal landlord system with a penal code each for each community to one of the most egalitarian societies anywhere in the world in this period. The declaration of Kerala as the first Indian state to have wiped out extreme poverty is a couple of months away.

Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan, or V.S. Achuthanandan, or VS, has walked every step in this tumultuous journey of the state for 85 years of the last century, contributed heavily, and has now passed into eternity, at 102. Born in 1923, he became a member of then-fledgling Communist Party when 17; under his leadership, the CPI in Alappuzha district contributed nine of the party’s tally of 63 seats in the first election to the Kerala Assembly in 1957 and made possible the first democratically-elected communist government with constitutional and legislative powers anywhere in the world.

Born into an agricultural labour family and having lost both his parents even before being a teenager, VS tasted the worst of material deprivations at an early age. The hard life moulded him in time into a quintessential Marxist-Leninist and a relentless fighter seeking to end those deprivations for his fellow countrymen. He used his party as a tool for change; he fought with it when it refused to toe his line, creating fissures within.

VS acquiesced himself to the paraphernalia of parliamentary politics in the later part of his life, and found it a powerful platform to further the cause of the working class. As Opposition leader and chief minister, he identified himself with those at the bottom of the pyramid and those who are at the receiving end of an exploitative system. He moved every lever available to him to deliver them justice. He was the voice of the voiceless: wronged women found in him a saviour who took up their cases with zeal and environmentalists, a guardian. A quick learner, he, as chief minister, promoted industries and investments in new technologies but objected to those about which he had no conviction.

As he passes, Kerala has changed a lot from the time when he was born, and as he himself stated, he indeed played a role in this humongous transformation. A worthwhile life it indeed was. He was the last of those idealists.