SITARAM YECHURY

                             SITARAM YECHURY 

            Sitaram Yechury is an Indian politician and a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).He was elected as its General Secretary on 19 April 2015. He is a member of the politburo of CPI (M) and the party's Parliamentary group leader.

Sitaram Yechury was born on 12 August 1952 in a Telugu speaking  family in Madras (Chennai). His father Sarveswara Somayajula Yechury was an engineer in the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation. His mother Kalpakam Yechury was a government officerHe grew up in Hyderabad and studied at All Saints High School, Hyderabad till his tenth standard. The Telangana agitation of 1969 brought him to Delhi. He joined Presidents Estate School, New Delhi and achieved the All-India first rank in the Central Board of Secondary Education Higher Secondary Examination. Subsequently, he studied B.A. (Hons.) in Economics at the St. Stephen's College, Delhi and M.A. in Economics, from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), achieving first class in both. He joined the JNU for a Ph.D. in Economics, which was aborted with his arrest during The Emergency.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 was 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). Yechury, along with Prakash Karat, was instrumental in creating an impregnable leftist bastion at JNU.

              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. 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. Yechury was elected to the Politburo at the Fourteenth Congress in 1992. 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 and politburo member S. Ramachandran Pillai were the frontrunners for the post but the former was unanimously chosen after Pillai chose to withdraw. Yechury succeeded Prakash Karat who held the post for three consecutive terms, from 2005 to 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.

               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. He is continuing as the editor of party organ People's Democracy for the past 20 years.