• Former Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan, one of India’s most respected Communist leaders and a key figure in Kerala’s political history, passed away in Thiruvananthapuram on July 21. He was 101.

• Achuthanandan, a founding member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was a lifelong champion of workers’ rights, land reforms, and social justice.

• He served as Kerala’s Chief Minister from 2006 to 2011 and was elected to the state Assembly seven times, serving three terms as Leader of the Opposition.

• VS, as he was popularly known, was the only surviving founding member of the CPI(M), which was formed in 1964 after the historic split in the undivided Communist party.

Rise in electoral politics

• Born on October 20, 1923 in Punnapra, Alappuzha, Velikkakathu Sankaran Achuthanandan lost his parents early in life. He dropped out of school while in class 7, and started doing odd jobs at tailoring shops and coir factories. 

• It was the legendary Communist leader P. Krishna Pillai, who saw the spark in a young Achuthanandan, and sent him to Kuttanad to understand the problems of the farmers and work among them in the 1940s. 

• Already a trade union leader, he mobilised the farmers and urged them to demand fair wages, and fought for their rights.

• The popular Punnapra-Vayalar uprising in 1946, against the Travancore Diwan C.P. Ramaswami Iyer’s bid to self-rule, saw Achuthanandan taking an active role in mobilising the farmers. He was arrested and was subjected to custodial torture.

• He was presumed dead and prepared for burial after being assaulted by police, only to survive and rise to become one of Kerala’s most towering political figures.

• He worked his way up in the undivided Communist Party of India, from being the Alappuzha district secretary to a state committee member and to becoming a state secretariat member in 1957.

• Achuthanandan was one of the 32 Communists who walked out of the CPI in 1964 to form the CPI(M). 

• He was made the party’s state secretary in 1980 and became a member of the Polit Bureau in 1985.

• He contested in elections for the first time in 1965, contesting from the Ambalapuzha assembly constituency in Alappuzha. Though he lost by over 2,000 votes, he won back the seat two years later.

• He was elected to the Kerala Legislative Assembly in 1967, 1970, 1991, 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016.  

• He served as the Leader of the Opposition thrice — first from 1992 to 1996, again from 2001 to 2006 and finally from 2011 to 2016.

• He led the LDF government from 2006 to 2011.

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