The Telugu-speaking Yechury will be the fifth general secretary of the 50-year-old party.
Rajya Sabha member, the Telugu-speaking Sitaram Yechury, was on Sunday unanimously elected as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary.
Yechury will be the fifth general secretary of the 50-year-old party.
While Yechury and Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai were the frontrunners for the post, Pillai withdrew from the race in the last minute leading to Yechury's unanimous election.
Yechury was elected as the all-India Joint Secretary of the Students Federation of India in 1978, and went on to become the all-India President of the SFI. He was also elected as the President of JNU's students union.
He was invited to the Central Committee of the CPI (M) in 1984. He got elected to the Central Committee in the CPI (M)'s 12th Congress in 1985, and to the Central Secretariat at the 13th Congress in 1988.
He became a Politburo member at the 14th Congress in 1992. In July 2005, he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal.
Speaking after his election, Yechury said that the 21st CPI (M) Congress was a "Congress for the future" of the party, India, and Left unity.
He alleged that the Modi government had unleashed a new trimurti - communalism, neoliberal economic policies and erosion of democratic practices.
"We must ensure that this trimurti doesn't convert into a Trishul that will pierce the heart of India," he said.
On the last day of the CPI-M national convention in held Vizag, elections were also held today for the national party executive and a 16-member CPI-M Politburo was elected comprising Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat, Ramachandran Pillai, Biman Basu, Manik Sarkar, Vijayan, B V Raghavulu, Balakrishnan, M A Baby, Suryakanth Mishra, Padmanabhan, Brinda Karat, Mohd Saleem, Subhashini Ali, Hannar Molla and G Ramakrishnan.
The party's new Central Committee has 91 members besides five special invitees and five permanent invitees.
Veteran leaders V S Achuthanandan, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Nirupam Sen have been dropped from the Central Committee. (INN)