HYDERABAD: “As India looks ahead to its 100th year of independence in 2047, we must ask whether we can build a politics based on principles rather than personality-driven loyalty,” Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said on Thursday. He was delivering the first Jyoti Komireddy Memorial Lecture.
Paying tribute to the former Congress MLA, the MP described her as a woman of courage, conviction and quiet strength, and said politicians should strive to uphold the values she embodied.
Reflecting on India’s political trajectory, Tharoor said the nation’s imagination had long been shaped by ideological currents such as cultural nationalism, socialism, religious revivalism and communism. Citing the 1991 elections, he said India had then begun a “remarkable tryst with liberalism”, referring to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which described liberal democracy as the “final form of government”.
He added that politics today leaves little room for genuine debate on values. He recalled that even a simple message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi had drawn criticism from within his party.