Etukuri Krishnamurthy

Etukuri Krishnamurthy was a veteran Indian freedom fighter and lifelong Communist Party of India (CPI) leader whose life stretched from the last years of British rule to the third decade of the twenty first century. He died of illness at CARE Banjara Hospital in Hyderabad on the night of Sunday, 20 September 2026, at the age of 104. His death was announced by Koonamneni Sambasiva Rao, the CPI Telangana State Secretary and Kothagudem MLA, who described him as a prominent freedom fighter and veteran Communist leader.

He was born on 9 September 1922 in Etukuru village in Guntur district, then in the Madras Presidency and now in Andhra Pradesh, the son of Etukuri Sitaramaiah. His elder brother, Etukuri Balarama Murthy, was a prominent Communist leader, Marxist intellectual and scholar, and it was through that household that Krishnamurthy was drawn into student politics and party work while still young. At fourteen he attended a programme marking the death anniversary of Bhagat Singh and thereafter moved steadily toward Communist organising. He was imprisoned several times for political activity, including during periods when the Communist Party was banned, and he later spoke of police torture during those arrests.

The Second World War redirected his path without ending his politics. Inspired by the call of Chandrashekhar Azad, and by the realisation after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union that a German victory would mean deeper slavery for India, he joined the British Indian Army in 1942. While serving, he helped organise a party cell in solidarity with the Royal Indian Navy ratings who mutinied in Bombay in 1946. He and three companions mobilised hundreds of soldiers, printed pamphlets and held demonstrations. For that work he was arrested, held for about seven to eight months in Lahore Jail in undivided India, and faced court martial. He escaped the court martial and, after Independence, joined the Revenue Department of the Andhra State government as a clerk.

In government service he became a leading figure in the NGO Association, organising state employees and fighting for their rights, and he helped organise freedom fighters into a union in undivided Andhra Pradesh. He remained active in CPI work in Telangana into extreme old age, authored several books, and as a centenarian still spoke publicly about the independence struggle and about the danger of politicians encouraging religious division. In a 2022 interview marking seventy five years of Independence he recalled a time when people of every religion and ideology had fought together, and lamented that parties were now sowing caste and communal discord.

His body was kept for public homage at Maqdoom Bhavan (Makhdoom Bhavan), the CPI Telangana State Office in Hyderabad, on Monday 21 September 2026, with final rites at Mahaprasthanam in Jubilee Hills that afternoon. In a country where first hand witnesses of the freedom movement have become rare, his death closed one of the longest living links between the independence struggle, the Communist movement in Andhra and Telangana, and the everyday politics of state employees and party workers who followed him.