India’s most talked-aboutpolitician
India’s most talked-about politician
Mahendra Ved takes a look at the life, work and allure of one of India’s most charismatic, admired yet controversial figures
How do you assess Shashi Tharoor, sent abroad on a serious task by a government of which he is often critical, being written and talked about, not for his known diplomatic skills, but for his famous popularity with women?
And where can you place this Indian lawmaker politically when influential sections of the party that he represents, rather vocally, try to push him out?
One may smell not one conspiracy but more by his detractors, of which he has many, out to sully his reputation. Yet this controversial man seems to live it all, with a winsome smile.
That includes the 2014 death of his third wife, of which he was accused but could not be formally charged for want of hard evidence. On 18 August 2021, a court in Delhi discharged Tharoor from all the charges.
‘It is a price one pays for being in public life,’ he said in ‘Aap ki Adalat’, a popular judicial inquisition on Indian television anchored by Rajat Sharma.
Dr Shashi Krishnan Chandrashekaran Tharoor, 69, known simply by his first and last names, is many things – ‘an Indian author, orator, former diplomat, public intellectual and statesman’, according to Wikipedia. Like Indian food, he is a rare potpourri – attractive, tasty, spicy, tangy, sweet, bitter in whatever he says or does, but never bland.
He is also handsome, and as the saying goes, ‘handsome is as handsome does’. Stern-looking women security officers in the Indian Parliament Complex request a selfie with him. He obliges, with his hands folded in Namaste. Social media calls him ‘international crush’.
A young lady at a recent conference, admitting that she was ‘star-struck’, asked that he ‘explain yourself’: how could he be ‘exceedingly good-looking’ and ‘implausibly brilliant and intelligent at the same time?’
Anyone else would have blushed, but Tharoor enjoys it. ‘Choose your parents wisely,’ he joked, adding, ‘It’s all in the genie’ but ‘everything must work at it’. He has much to say because he has read habitually since childhood, has retained it and writes a lot.
Beyond the lighter part of his public persona, Tharoor is today the most talked-about Indian
Beyond the lighter part of his public persona (hopefully, without making the language mistakes that he wouldn’t), Tharoor is today the most talked-about Indian. He remains so, although Prime Minister Modi has overtaken him on social media, perhaps because he holds the country’s most powerful office.
The two are two sides of the present-day India: America-educated Tharoor speaks English with a clipped British accent, which he picked up during his schooling in then-Calcutta and Bombay and Delhi’s St Stephen’s College, while Modi, home-grown, also multi-lingual, avoids English as far as he can.
They also represent contrasting Indias, socially and politically. Unlike Modi, Tharoor adheres to the liberal ‘Idea of India’ (a phrase coined by Tagore), celebrating religion, minus religiosity and ‘othering’ of others. ‘I have long thought of myself as liberal, not merely in the political sense of the term or even in relation to principles of economics, but as an attitude to life.’
Despite their differences, Modi picked Tharoor to lead the most high-profile of the seven parliamentary teams to explain how India counters the terror trail that leads to India, beginning at the ISI, the Pakistan Army’s notorious spy network.
‘You can't breed vipers in your back yard and expect them to bite only your neighbours’
Tharoor’s team of lawmakers visited the US and other places in the western hemisphere. Pakistan fielded a handsome, but younger, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, who claimed that Pakistan was also ‘a victim of terrorism’. The Indian gladiator, with the US being his old hunting ground for education and the United Nations for diplomacy, carried the fight to the third generation of Bhuttos (after Zulfiqar and Benazir). He shot back: ‘Whose fault is that?’ and added: ‘As Hillary Clinton famously said ten years ago, “You can’t breed vipers in your backyard and expect them to bite only your neighbours”.’
After his Doctorate at Tufts, Tharoor joined the UN and was an Under Secretary General under Kofi Annan. He dared to contest for the UN Secretary General’s post, with blessings from the Premier, Manmohan Singh. But critics say he was not ‘our man’ for the foreign office, which was cold to his candidature. Not having the resources of South Korea, and since an Indian at the top of the UN heap would scare many nations, he lost to Ban Ki-moon.
Tharoor then joined politics and was briefly a minister under Manmohan Singh. He has been elected four times from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala state. His English accent apart, Tharoor angers some inward-looking Congressmen from Kerala, who would love to see him out.
‘Nobody is a saint in his own home,’ Tharoor might say with a chuckle. Not if he supports Modi’s many policies, and the Vizhinjam international sea-port built in his constituency, with money from the Adani Group that his party boss, Rahul Gandhi, loves to hate.
Gandhi’s perceived silence at Tharoor-baiting may have emboldened Modi and his party to woo Tharoor with greater fervour. Short of people who can speak coherently and credibly, particularly in the international arena where India wants to make a bigger mark, the Modi Government would welcome him.
It is to Tharoor’s credit that he has, so far, not taken the bait that would be a significant gain for the BJP in polls-bound Kerala. Unless he loses his political cool and quits Congress, it is doubtful that the party will force him out. But then, the party lost many outstanding leaders, like Captain Amrinder Singh, Maharaja of the erstwhile Patiala state, before the Punjab polls. Most who left had sought greater accountability from the ‘high command’. More than them, Tharoor had dared to contest and lost against the ‘official’ candidate for the party’s presidency.
Then there are his literary achievements. The word ‘thesaurus’ has become ‘Tharooaurus’ on social media. A best-selling author and a Sahitya Akademi Award winner, he has written many works of fiction and non-fiction since 1981.
Although sending out opposition lawmakers to make the Indian case is an Indian tradition, this time around, with the coming diplomatic battles promising to become more challenging, Tharoor possesses that rare blend of marrying diplomacy to politics, with more than a touch of flamboyance. He would certainly be an asset, no matter which party he represents within the country.
Mahendra Ved is a columnist at Lokmarg.com
News has just come in that a member of the independent Election Commission, Ms PMS Charles, has resigned. The reason for her resignation is not known but speculation in Colombo is that she was pressured to quit in further moves to scupper the election. It is also being said that one or more of the surviving three members will also resign as pressure mounts. This could happen by independence day