Former Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan passed away at a private hospital in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday (July 21, 2025, 3:20 pm). He was 101. He was Chief Minister from 2006 to 2011. Mr. Achuthanandan had withdrawn from public life after he suffered a minor stroke in 2019. He had since led an assisted life at his son, V. Arun Kumar’s, residence in Thiruvananthapuram.
The veteran communist and freedom fighter was an icon of the communist movement in Kerala and a towering, if not fiery, presence in State politics for decades. As a crusading Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Achuthanandan was a standard-bearer for uphill public causes, including environmental protection, gender equality, wetland conservation, better pay for nurses, transgender rights, and free software.
Mr. Achuthanandan began his political career at the age of 16 by joining the popular opposition against the feudal landlords and colonial rule in Alappuzha. He cut his teeth as an activist and agitator by organising indentured agriculture labourers and Aspinwall factory workers in Kuttanad. Mr. Achuthanandan was actively involved in the militant Left agitation against the colonial government in 1946, which culminated in the storied and tragic Punnapra-Vayalar uprising.
He went underground but was arrested and tortured in police custody. Mr. Achuthanandan later recollected that the police beat him and pierced his foot with a rifle bayonet. He said the police left him for dead and would have ended in an anonymous grave if not for a fellow prisoner who spotted signs of life.
Born into a family of agricultural workers in Punnapra, Alappuzha, in 1923, Mr. Achuthanandan faced numerous trials and tribulations, including the daily deprivations of poverty alongside distressing personal and political struggles. Mr. Achuthanandan lost his parents early, his mother to smallpox, and was initiated into the freedom movement at 16 by the pioneering communist leader P. Krishna Pillai. He would later term Krishna Pillai as a “guru” who gave him a clear political purpose and direction in life.
Mr. Achuthanandan often joked that he would immerse himself in a temple pond until the only set of clothes he owned dried on the steps. The temple priest fed him leftovers of puja rice, and he briefly apprenticed as a tailor. In 1964, Mr. Achuthanandan left the national council of the undivided Communist Party of India to become one of the founding members of the breakaway Communist Party of India (Marxist). Later, during the Emergency, the government jailed him.
Mr. Achuthanandan had officiated as CPI(M) State secretary. But he was not always a stickler for iron-clad party discipline as Chief Minister. In 2009, the CPI(M) expelled him from the party’s Polit Bureau for defying the CPI(M) State secretariat.
