THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Shashi Tharoor once again stood out with ‘Think Tomorrow, Think Tharoor’, his smartly-worked 13-page manifesto for the Congress presidential election though a blunder and a typo took the sheen off it. The booklet had a map of India without parts of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh and the Thiruvananthapuram MP apologised “unconditionally” for the blunder.
“No one does such things on purpose. A small team of volunteers made a mistake. We rectified it immediately & I apologise unconditionally for the error,” he tweeted. Earlier in 2019, in his tweet about participation in a rally at Kozhikode against Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, Tharoor shared a ‘distorted’ map of India on Twitter. The northernmost territory of the country was missing from the map.
A typo, “Think Tomorror, Think Tharoor’’ also cropped up in the manifesto.One key point he endorses is a two-year term for Congress president. He says the party chief should be accessible to all and he/she should regularly interact with party workers.
Tharoor also calls for decentralisation so that the party delegates powers to the state, district and block-level leaders and empowers grass-root workers. He also has promised to implement the “one person, one post” ideology and to stand for the principles of secularism and an “energetic and confident foreign policy”.
Tharoor said youths, among whom he has a huge fan following, should be given a chance. He added more leadership roles should be given to women. In the last three Lok Sabha elections, Tharoor’s campaign in Thiruvananthapuram was run by his own team, with external agencies performing the task instead of local party leadership. The Thiruvananthapuram district Congress leadership joined only towards the end, not involving too much.