If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
- Rudyard Kipling
Over the past week, the ubiquitous, loquacious wordsmith Dr Shashi Tharoor, a four-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, has dominated headlines in Indian media. Let us be honest, how many current politicians worldwide boast of his mind-numbing bio? This dapper outlier of Indian politics who almost became the UN Secretary-General would be a prized asset wherever he went.
But in India’s grand old party (born in 1885), Shashi has been frequently treated like a third shoe or fifth wheel. A wasted asset, like a Porsche convertible that only adorns a dilapidated garage.
Bedlam followed Shashi’s uncharacteristic belligerence after a meeting with the Congress leadership (read, Rahul Gandhi): “I have options!” said the flamboyant charmer, albeit the newspaper was cleverly twisting that phrase. But in Indian politics, ideological fidelity can be as short-lived as the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez marriage. Shashi beat that dubious trend, emerging since 2004 as probably the most admired brand ambassador of the idea of India, a secular, liberal nation, in synchronicity with the ideology of the Congress.
However, Shashi’s discomfiture with the Congress became such a bombshell that it overshadowed US President Donald Trump’s more nuclear utterances. Is Shashi Tharoor joining the BJP, asked flummoxed journalists. That would be like Elon Musk selling leaflets about Karl Marx’s economic philosophy. So, what is going on?
I suspect what got the Congress triggered was Shashi’s rather magnanimous observations on PM Narendra Modi’s visibly embarrassing non-performance in Washington to meet his hug-buddy Trump. India got a bad deal: a tit-for-tat tariff equaliser likely to take the oomph out of sensex; BRICS was treated contemptuously; India promised to buy expensive fighter aircraft that Musk thought were better suited for making drone-like Swiggy/Zomato food deliveries; and when a reporter asked the PM about Gautam Adani’s celebrated shenanigans, Modi said some gobbledygook that many are still to comprehend. Bottomline: Modi’s trip, even by the most liberal yardsticks, would probably rate at a D-.
The Congress expected Shashi to give Modi an F. Instead, Shashi gave Modi a clean chit that would have surprised even the megalomaniac. Given the preposterous allegations the BJP repeatedly makes against the Congress, the party felt shortchanged. The BJP methodically rubbed it in: “Your best foreign policy mind has endorsed Modi.” Boom! Shashi was instantly labelled as a renegade by some not-so-friendly colleagues. Shashi’s equally kind-hearted appraisal of the Left Front government’s start-up schemes in Kerala had the local tigers frothing in fury.
But politics has multiple layers. Behind the public farrago of foofaraw (this phrase is dedicated to Shashi) between the Congress and Tharoor lies a studious neglect of the politician over many years.
A party facing increasing electoral obsolescence and not leveraging its star asset is like India asking Virat Kohli to appear as the last batsman with 40 runs to get in the last over. It is bizarre. Why was Tharoor not made the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha instead of the fumbling Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, whose faux pas made more headlines than his speeches? True, Tharoor was made Chairman of the All-India Professionals Congress, but the AIPC remained poorly funded, had little organisational muscle, and at best made perfunctory pontifications on policy matters that the Congress itself never took seriously.
Tharoor ran for Congress president (the first election in over two decades) and was trounced by veteran Mallikarjun Kharge, a trusted lieutenant of the top brass. I still believe that had Tharoor won that crucial election, the Congress would have structurally changed and seen a fundamental metabolism. That’s what an unconventional, independent leader can bring about or is forced to do to create a signature impact.
The BJP and Modi are successful by-products of Congress’s shocking apathy, its self-inflicted paralysis. While the Bharat Jodo Yatra was a blockbuster for Rahul’s political brand, the party still appears to be in the stone age. Good people continue to leave; it still allows BJP to set the agenda and rarely sets the storyboard on fire. Intermittently, Rahul disappears into his comforting cocoon and worse, election defeats are mounting. The INDIA alliance is gallivanting aimlessly under an insipid Congress guidance.
The Congress is that rare political species that refuses to learn from the old idiom, once bitten, twice shy. It enthusiastically offers itself for further masochistic experimentations. It believes that to defeat the BJP, it needs to do nothing dramatically novel, that it can achieve that much-awaited comeback by just doing more of the same.
It must learn from Apple Inc. The iPhone brand has several new model launches and enhanced tech versions of their product introduced in stunning Hollywood-style extravaganza shows, despite being a market leader. In the interim, they continuously push software/system upgrades.
Change is relentless; the alternative is extinction. The choice is for the Congress to make. Keeping Tharoor back in the flock may be a good first step in recognising that it needs to listen.
(Views are personal)
Sanjay Jha | Former Congress spokesperson