News Mania Desk/ Piyal Chatterjee / 13th September 2024
Sitaram Yechury, a former Rajya Sabha MP and general secretary of the CPI(M), passed away on Thursday at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi. He had been admitted on August 19 due to pneumonia. He was seventy-two.
Leaders of CPI(M) stated that Yechury was receiving treatment for an acute respiratory tract infection in the intensive care unit (ICU). His health was deemed severe, and for the past few days, he has been receiving care from a multidisciplinary team of doctors while being kept on respiratory support.
His son Danish, daughter Akhila, and wife Seema Chishti, editor of The Wire, precede him.
For educational and research purposes, his family has donated his body to AIIMS, New Delhi. On Saturday, his body will be given to the medical facility.
Yechury’s body will be transferred on Friday from AIIMS to his Delhi home, where it will be stored over night. In the evening, his remains would be given to AIIMS after being brought to the CPI(M) central committee office on Saturday morning for public viewing.
President Droupadi Murmu expressed her grief over the demise of Yechury. “First as a student leader and then in national politics and as a parliamentarian, he had a distinct and influential voice. Though a committed ideologue, he won friends cutting across the party lines. My heartfelt condolences to his family and colleagues,” the President said in her condolence message.
Congress Parliamentary Party president Sonia Gandhi referred to Yechury as a “powerful champion of secularism” and stated that he was instrumental in the formation of UPA-1 as well as having recently made a significant contribution to the rise of the INDIA group ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Gandhi stated, “He will be sorely missed.”
In 2015, Yechury took over as the CPM’s general secretary, replacing Prakash Karat.
Yechury was trained under the late Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the leader of the party, who was instrumental in the coalition era’s governance, first under V P Singh’s National Front government and later under the United Front government of 1996–1997. The CPI(M) had supported both of these governments from outside.
Additionally, because of Karat’s unyielding stance, the Left parties abandoned the UPA-I government, and he had been instrumental in the negotiations with the government for the Indo-US nuclear accord.
