Much about Comrade Sitaram Yechury (1952-2024) is publicly well-known – the beginnings of his public life in the students’ movement; his leadership of the Students’ Federation of India and the JNU students’ movement; his imprisonment during the Emergency; his joining, and subsequent rapid ascent in the Communist Party of India (Marxist); his engagements with the international communist movement; his role in bringing together secular parties to forge a broad front against the fascistic, Hindutva-obsessed RSS-BJP; his outstanding contributions as a parliamentarian; his expertise in economics coupled with his fine application of the Marxist method to the analysis of the Indian reality, particularly to understanding caste and communalism.

What is not so well known is that Comrade Sitaram was one of the founding directors and member of the Editorial Advisory Board at LeftWord Books. From the start of LeftWord Books in 1999, he had been an advocate of the work we have been doing. Along with Prakash Karat, N. Ram, Aijaz Ahmad, Prabhat Patnaik, Indira Chandrasekhar, V.K. Ramachandran and P. Govinda Pillai, Comrade Sitaram was an active participant in the meetings of the Editorial Advisory Board. He would read proposals and comment on them; he would propose ideas for new projects we could pursue; he would give feedback on books we published. Above all, his presence meant that the meetings would be full of humour, good cheer and optimism.

Sadly for us, he stepped down from being a director of the company after he became a member of parliament. This was because he himself had raised the issue of conflict of interest when parliamentarians owned or led private companies. This was particularly galling, he argued, if they also wormed their way into parliamentary committees that oversaw the sectors that overlapped with their business interests. Even though Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns the LeftWord imprint, was minuscule as compared to giant conglomerates that operated across, say, aviation, liquor, media, and sports, it was for him a matter of principle that as a parliamentarian he should not be seen as having private business interests, even though he had never been paid by the company nor derived any pecuniary advantage from it.

He continued his association with LeftWord Books informally, and advised us on our editorial direction and about the gaps in our vision as we developed over the years. He would read our books regularly and give us important feedback on them.

On his desk, after his death, we found that Comrade Sitaram had several LeftWord titles that he had been reading.

The escalation of Hindutva within Indian society was closely tracked by Comrade Sitaram. He wrote several important articles that revealed the fascistic character of this movement in the 1980s, articles that were later published as What is This Hindu Rashtra?: On Golwalkar's Fascistic Ideology and the Saffron Brigade's Practice (1993). Subsequently, Comrade Sitaram built a body of work – articles and short booklets – on the theme of the Hindu Right, trying to understand its ideological and institutional character as well as its relationship to Indian liberalism.

Over the past few years, Comrade Sitaram had been talking to us about doing a fuller version of What is This Hindu Rashtra?, updated beyond 1993 to include the rise of Narendra Modi and the BJP alliance to power in Delhi. We had hoped to encourage him to get the project done in 2025, after the conclusion of his final term as General Secretary of the CPI(M), but alas, that book will not be published. Instead, we will bring out a collection of his writings on communalism, which would have been the anchor of the book that he had planned.

– Sudhanva Deshpande and Vijay Prashad

Image: Comrade Sitaram releasing the bilingual edition of The Communist Manifesto on 15 March 2019, to mark twenty years of LeftWord Books. Others in the photo (L to R): Sudhanva Deshpande, Prakash Karat, Subhashini Ali.

https://www.instagram.com/leftwordbooks/reel/C9CNknQPlgg/

https://www.facebook.com/comradevoix/videos/vijay-prashad-editor-leftword-books-speaks-on-the-new-book-from-the-publishing-h/1106994277099594/

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International Union of Left Publishers calls on left writers, publishers, bookshops, and readers to join us to rescue the collective life on 21 February 2024, Red Books Day. As on the previous days, we encourage you to hold public readings of your favourite Red Books in your own language (it is also International Mother Language Day). In 2023, a million people participated in Red Books Day; for 2024, we would like to at least double the number!

Red Books Day takes place on the date in 1848 when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. That book, one of the most widely read in the world, inspired billions of people over the past century and a half to build a process of socialism that would transcend the stalled problems created by capitalism (hunger, illiteracy, poverty). We honour the Manifesto by holding Red Books Day on February 21.

We urge all left writers, publishers, bookshops, and readers to organise public readings of any red books, by rooting these readings in a festival-like atmosphere, a left culture for our times. It is important to note that Red Books Day is an event that has no centre, no directing force as such. IULP is the initiator, but we would like left writers, publishers, bookshops, and readers to do anything to encourage the reading of Red Books not only on February 21, but in fact through the year.

Some resources to help build Red Books Day 2024:

1. Please visit our website, redbooksday.org. At the site, you will find the following:
2. A brochure that you could circulate about Red Books Day.
3. A short video that could be downloaded and uploaded by you in social media or on your YouTube channel.
4. Artwork from previous years (https://redbooksday.org/Art).: The art team associated with Red Books Day will release a poster every month from 21 December onwards that will be collected in 2025 into a booklet. More information about this activity will be available soon.
5. Please use the social media toolkit if you find it useful (https://redbooksday.org/Social-Media-Toolkit).
6. We are encouraging publishers and writers to share short snippets of left poetry in their original language through their social media channels, using the hashtag #RedBooksDay (# with Red Books Day in your language). These snippets can be used by other publishers as well as part of building the atmosphere toward Red Books Day 2024 and onward.
7. The IULP will send out a note early next year about the creation of small booklets that collect the reminiscences from left political leaders and writers about their experience with Red Books in their youth.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.

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Warmly,

International Union of Left Publishers.