Kamal Chenoy and I first met 50 years ago in 1976, but it was only four years later that we drew closer, while competing for the same job at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Selections are always uncertain affairs and positions do not always go to those who most deserve them. Many people, and I among them, believed that Kamal was a strong favourite but the job came to me, a pretty unknown aspirant, a dark horse who was not even a student of JNU. Among competitors invariably something lingers: a trace of rancour, a sense of having been wronged, a coolness towards the one who won. Kamal’s response was the very opposite. He congratulated me warmly. It takes a rare largeness of spirit to turn a loss into a gift for the person who vanquished you. It was the first, and definitely not the last lesson, Kamal taught me. Losing well with grace and dignity is an art, one that can evoke admiration. From August 1980 onwards, we spent more and more time together and developed a growing respect for each other that only flourished with time – mine for his political understanding and extraordinary moral qualities, and his, I think, for whatever ability he saw in me. Kamal and Anu, and Tani and I, through thick and thin, became participants not merely in each other’s political lives, but were also always there for each other at the most crucial moments in every aspect of our personal lives. Together, we learnt that friendship, too, is a moral achievement, built with generosity, honesty and shared joy and sorrow. We are poorer without Kamal and immeasurably richer for having known him.Kamal was a communist but his communism was never a creed. He was unwavering and committed without being dogmatic. His convictions were held as something precious and alive, kept close, but never gripped so tightly that they lost their breath. A democrat to the core, he was a fierce defender of civil liberties, passionately secular and an unflinching anti-imperialist. What was most striking was that he did not need to bind all this into a tight, closed system. Sure, these commitments were interdependent, but none had absolute priority over the others. Balancing them, he lived by them all. He carried his politics lightlyHe had a sharp political sense. Incisive and quick, a formidable debater, he mercilessly mocked the powerful and, in the very next moment, could be warm and friendly to the very people he had skewered. Most can manage either the mockery or the friendliness, but seldom both together. That is a rare gift. Kamal managed it because there was no malice in his wit and no self-righteousness in his politics. He never looked down at others or sanctimoniously assumed a position of superiority. He never lived even as a first among equals. Living as an equal, among equals, was the right way to be for him. He carried his politics lightly, with style and without the heavy, funereal air that the left once mistook for seriousness. His student-hood carried into his teaching and his qualities as a student leader into his role as the president of the JNU Teachers’ Association. He infused a seductive youthfulness into his leadership roles in party politics. I think he was a quintessential Gen-Z politician, a leader before his time, for he did his political activism with wit and charm. Indeed, with swagger, with dignified insouciance and with unsentimental compassion. Swagger that never turned into vanity, dignity that was never boring or stiff, insouciance that never degenerated into immaturity and compassion that never melted into sentimental pity. He had enough respect for people to not feel sorry for them. His politics was remarkable for its generosity and he belonged, in a sense, to every party, every faction and splinter of the communist movement, and even to a non-existent, utopian party of the entire progressive left. He was not factional, because his partisanship was to causes, not to cliques or narrow ideologies. His foremost instinct was for solidarity, for a broader progressive alliance. He had multiple allegiances and attachments, and he saw no contradiction in that. His attitude, if I may put it this way, was: you hold sacred the values as you see them; I hold them sacred as I interpret them, because they are all manifestations of the same cause, of a higher good which we all serve. He did not abandon one commitment in order to take up another. He added, widened and included. So he stood with several political movements and with all forms of progressive political actors. A resolute defender of the Palestinian cause, a supporter of democracy in Russia and those hungry for freedom in China, he was devoted to anti-imperialisms of every hue. Whether or not you were broadly on his side, he always found a way to engage. He was, in the truest sense, non-sectarian. I have only once seen him shaken out of his youthfulness, when he set out with many deeply committed civil society activists on a journey of 51 days across this country to discover India. He came back a changed man, more solemn and quieter, never quite the same after those two months on the road. After this experience, he plunged deeper into social movements, making his political world wider still. An atheist and a fierce anti-ZionistLet me return to Kamal the individual. He was an unusually public person without an inner fortress to retreat into. What you saw was what he was – a kind of transparency often mistaken for simplicity, but in Kamal it was a hard-won clarity. Kamal had a way with children, as I saw when he interacted with his own grandchildren as well as with my grandson. He also had a way with dogs – all kinds of dogs, of all ages and sizes, those he had known for a long time and those that had never met him before. They all took to him at once, as if they knew something about him before we did. Children and dogs are the most reliable judges of character. They cannot be argued with and they cannot be charmed by position. They recognised in Kamal what we all came to recognise: an openness, an absence of guile and a heart that did not keep a ledger.I want to also mention something about his heritage, which he quietly cherished. Marx and Lenin were not part of it. To be a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party of India was a choice he made entirely on his own. But through his mother and grandmother, he was a Baghdadi Jew and he carried that inheritance with pride. How could an atheist and a fierce anti-Zionist do so? The ‘Aaron’ in his complete name was important to him because it had been bequeathed to him by his mother, Shanta, and his grandmother, Hannah. Jewishness was not part of the outward shape of his life, and yet it sat somewhere in him, not as religious doctrine or a political claim, but as a loving bond with them. He loved them, therefore, he was a bit Jewish. Indeed, if anything, the political inheritance from his mother and grandmother was their association with Gandhi and Nehru, amply established in family albums and photographs on the walls of his home. The boy in Connaught Place and the man we knewI conclude with an anecdote. When his mother was remarrying, she was at Connaught Place in Delhi to buy herself a wedding saree, accompanied by an 11-year-old Kamal. When Shanta hesitated over a saree she felt was far too loud or expensive, and picked a rather simple one instead, Kamal encouraged her and quipped, “Come on mom, take the one you liked, the brighter, more expensive one. After all, you only get married once.” The wit, the timing, the cheek, the warmth were all there already. The boy in Connaught Place and the man we knew were the same person.We have lost a comrade, a teacher, a debater, a leader and a friend. But Kamal would not want us to leave a conversation heavy-hearted. He would want to argue a little, laugh a lot and then return to social and political work. So we should remember him with seriousness, but without gravity. We should carry on his politics of solidarity over sectarianism and his commitment without dogma. And let us try, if we can, to bring a little of his swagger, humour and dignity to our politics. Rajeev Bhargava is the director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ Institute of Indian Thought. He has been a professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi.