Chennai:
"Death is better than living in dishonour, " CPM leader W R Varadarajan wrote on February 11, the night he left his Chennai home.
A body fished out of a Chennai lake on Sunday evening was his, said his wife, based on identification marks on the decomposed corpse.
On Monday, the Chennai police confirmed that the body was indeed that of Varadarajan's. The fingerprints matched those in an application submitted for a US visa by the Left leader.
Varadarajan began his career as a Reserve Bank of India official, but found his calling in the trade union movement. In the 1980s, he became the secretary of The Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
A man close to the cadre, he would return from New Delhi to his roots, to contest the Villivakkam seat in the 1989 Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. He won by a record margin of almost 50 per cent of the votes.
In 2008, new recognition came as he was inducted into his party's most-senior decision-making body, the CPIM Central Committee.
Then, a few months ago, the Tamil Nadu CPM presented a report to the Central Committee which described Varadarajan as a leader unbecoming of the CPM. Sources say, at about the same time, his wife too had complained about him to his party. At the party's meet in Kolkata in February, Varadarajan was removed from all party posts.
Before killing himself, Varadarajan left everything to the party that he felt let him down. His bank balance was willed to the CPM fund, his books and laptop to the party's Tamil newspaper, Theekathir.
A body fished out of a Chennai lake on Sunday evening was his, said his wife, based on identification marks on the decomposed corpse.
On Monday, the Chennai police confirmed that the body was indeed that of Varadarajan's. The fingerprints matched those in an application submitted for a US visa by the Left leader.
Varadarajan began his career as a Reserve Bank of India official, but found his calling in the trade union movement. In the 1980s, he became the secretary of The Centre of Indian Trade Unions.
A man close to the cadre, he would return from New Delhi to his roots, to contest the Villivakkam seat in the 1989 Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. He won by a record margin of almost 50 per cent of the votes.
In 2008, new recognition came as he was inducted into his party's most-senior decision-making body, the CPIM Central Committee.
Then, a few months ago, the Tamil Nadu CPM presented a report to the Central Committee which described Varadarajan as a leader unbecoming of the CPM. Sources say, at about the same time, his wife too had complained about him to his party. At the party's meet in Kolkata in February, Varadarajan was removed from all party posts.
Before killing himself, Varadarajan left everything to the party that he felt let him down. His bank balance was willed to the CPM fund, his books and laptop to the party's Tamil newspaper, Theekathir.
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