K. Varadharajan, an outstanding leader of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), died on May 16, 2020 at the age of 73. In his death, the democratic peasant movement has lost a dedicated fighter, most of whose adult life was spent in the pursuit of agrarian revolution in India.

KV, as Varadharajan was popularly known, was born on October 4, 1946 in the temple town of Srirangam in Tamil Nadu. After completing a diploma in civil engineering, KV joined the state government service in the Public Works Department. His career as a government servant was, however, very brief. Drawn to Left politics, KV joined the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 1969, and became a full time worker of the Party in 1970, rejecting in the interregnum an offer of employment from the Life Insurance Corporation of India, since he had already made up his mind to dedicate his life to the pursuit of the people’s democratic revolution.

Political India was in ferment in the late 1960s, following the triple economic crisis of 1966 relating to food, foreign exchange, and rupee resources. In 1967, the Congress was defeated in the elections to the Legislative Assemblies in eight states while it won the Lok Sabha elections with a reduced majority. The early years of the green revolution had seen an intensification of class contradictions in rural India and an upsurge of the peasant movement in the Eastern and Southern regions of the country, with the Left making some advance, especially in West Bengal and Kerala. Many young people were inspired by the militant movements of the workers and peasants that grew in scale in the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. In addition to the political developments in India, the heroic struggle of the people of Indo-China (Viet Nam in particular) was a source of inspiration to many progressive young people in India. In this overall context, it is not altogether surprising that KV joined the political Left.

KV’s dedication to his chosen cause and his willingness to work hard and to learn from both practical political-organizational work and theoretical studies saw him entrusted with important responsibilities in the Communist movement. The early 1970s saw a spate of strikes as workers sought to fight anti-worker policies and attempts to impose a wage freeze. The culmination of this round of militancy was the all-India railway strike. KV was in the thick of these struggles in the district of Tiruchirapalli. The internal Emergency imposed by the Indian National Congress led by Indira Gandhi from June 25 midnight in 1975 led to KV going underground to continue his political work. A year after the Emergency was lifted, KV was elected in 1978 as the Secretary of the Tiruchirapalli district committee of the CPI(M). In the ensuing State Conference, he was elected to the Tamil Nadu state committee of the CPI(M). In 1986, KV was elected to the Tamil Nadu state secretariat of the Party. He was elected to the Central Committee (CC) of the CPI(M) in 1998 and to its Polit Bureau in 2005. He was a member of the Polit Bureau until 2015, and in the Central Committee till his death.

KV played a crucial role in the expansion of the agricultural workers’ movement and movements against caste oppression from the mid-1970s through the 1980s under the leadership of Left in Tiruchi district.

KV’s prime arena of mass political work was the agrarian movement. In 1986, KV was elected Secretary of the AIKS unit of Tamil Nadu. Over the next 10 years, he played a key role in the AIKS and the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union (AIAWU) in Tamil Nadu, always alert to the understanding that the axis of the people’s democratic revolution in India is the worker-peasant alliance, with a focus in the countryside on poor peasants and agricultural workers. He was elected all-India General Secretary of the AIKS in 1998 and served in that capacity till 2013. At the time of his death, he was a Vice President of the AIKS.

Greatly influenced by the writings of E. M. S. Namboodiripad, P. Sundarayya and B. T. Ranadive, KV was alive to the importance of simultaneously fighting against both caste oppression and class exploitation. KV saw the caste system as both part of the relations of production and, in terms of its Brahmanical ideology, of the political and ideological superstructure (although he did not necessarily articulate the issue in these terms).

Despite being deeply involved in day to day work in the peasant movement and other political tasks, KV found time to read widely, and tried to keep himself abreast of contemporary developments in politics, economics, culture, and society. KV was a man of multifarious interests and talents. He composed poems and skits for the street plays of the Party, and could set them to music as well. There was a joie de vivre about him that would prompt him to dance to street theatre music at conferences of the Party and the Kisan Sabha, not in the least inhibited by the high positions of responsibility he was holding in these organisations.

A distinctive aspect of KV’s contributions to the movement to which he devoted his adult life was that he managed to involve a good section of his extended family in it. KV bore no malice towards anyone, and was always willing to walk the extra mile to help comrades and clear their confusions.

Adieu, KV! Just as much as you are the product of the movements that you were involved in, you have also shaped these movements with your unique style of dedicated work and modesty worthy of emulation. At a time of renewed neoliberal assault reinforced with communal hate politics, the progressive movements will sorely miss you.