Com. Sitharam Yechuri : General secretary of CPIM. Yechuri is noted politician and Marxist in India. He is a former member of Rajyasabha.
Yechury joined the Students Federation of India (SFI) in 1974. A year later, he joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
He was arrested in 1975 during the Emergency while he was still a student at JNU. He went underground for some time, organising resistance to the Emergency, before his arrest. After the Emergency, he was elected as the President of the JNU Students’ Union thrice during one year (1977–78).[citation needed] Yechury, along with Prakash Karat, was instrumental in creating an impregnable leftist bastion at JNU.[9]
In 1978, he was elected as All-India Joint Secretary of SFI, and went on to become the All India President of SFI. He was the first president of SFI who was not from Kerala or Bengal.[6] He left SFI in 1986. In 1984, he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPI(M). In 1985, the party constitution was modified and a five-man central secretariat was elected, consisting of younger stalwarts – Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat, Sunil Moitra, P. Ramachandran and S. Ramachandran Pillai – to work under the direction and control of the politburo.[9] Yechury was elected to the Politburo at the Fourteenth Congress in 1992.[10] Yechury was elected as the fifth General Secretary of CPI (M) at the party’s 21st party Congress in Visakhapatnam on 19 April 2015.
Yechury is billed as the true heir to the coalition-building legacy of former general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet. Yechury worked with P. Chidambaram to draft the common minimum programme for the United Front government in 1996 and had actively pursued the coalition-building process during the formation of the United Progressive Alliance government in 2004.[13][14]
Yechury has headed the party’s international department and the party used to depute him as fraternal delegate to the party conferences of most socialist countries. A prolific writer, he has authored many books and writes the fortnightly column Left Hand Drive for Hindustan Times, a widely circulated daily.[15] He is continuing as the editor of party organ People’s Democracy for the past 20 years.