New Delhi
In the age of social media, one way of profiling someone is to follow the digital breadcrumbs. Having said that, Shashi Tharoor’s Twitter timeline makes a great read and takes almost as much time as reading one of his novels because he is a very prolific tweetizen. I went through his June timeline and came across a politician whose interests are not just routine politics but geopolitics, constitutional values, the idea of India, leadership paradigms, the world of books—with even some insights into mindful parenting. From chartered accountants, doctors, teachers, MSME professionals, students, academics, catholic priests (especially those in Kerala), parliamentary colleagues, cricket administrators, badminton players, authors, selfie seekers to a colleague’s three-year-old grandchild—there is a tweet here for every section of society and every demography. And once in a while, there’s one just for Foreign Minister Dr S. Jaishankar.
This cross-section outreach is the reason why this three-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram managed to notch up 1,072 votes in the Congress president’s elections last year, vis-à-vis Mallikarjun Kharge’s tally of 7,987. This is the highest any challenger to the “official” Congress presidential candidate has ever got. More than Tharoor’s personal score, what the Congress got was an election that checked the democracy box, for Tharoor throwing his hat into the ring at least made it look like an election and not just another choreographed selection. But no high command ever likes anyone rewriting a script it has cleared, even if it’s done by a world renowned author; and there will probably be a price to pay.
Regardless, the UN diplomat turned politician is one of those entities who doesn’t need a party platform to ensure his views are heard, if nowhere else, then on his Twitter timeline, which has an outreach to 8.4 million followers. Plus, there are always book launches and literature festivals, which have become today’s townhalls. It can safely be said that no book launch is complete without Tharoor on the dais.
There is a reason as to why he is so sought after. Whatever the political debate of the day, he is usually the first off the mark with a well-articulated take on the topic. For instance, he has this to say on the Uniform Civil Code: “Pandit Nehru said that UCC is desirable but you have to take everyone along. Don’t forget in any country, if people have acquired entrenched rights, it’s always a challenge to take away these rights. The British gave different communities different personal laws. You can’t now uninvent them, because people are used to those systems…to take away something they already have is to generate resistance, and it’s up to the government of the day as to what kind of politics they want to play.” This is a nuanced critique of the way the Modi government is forcing change without first building a consensus. Since debates on Hindutva are now almost part of our daily diet, you will find enough takers for the brand that Tharoor is espousing. While he doesn’t go on a hugging spree he does talk about the diversity and inclusiveness that Hinduism stands for.
Strewn all over his Twitter timeline are excerpts from his public interactions and interviews, both to the foreign and Indian media. He has often taken on the BJP for its politics of polarisation, cautioning its leaders that “History has often been a contested terrain in India, but its revival in the context of 21st century politics is a sobering sign that the past continues to have a hold over the Hindutva movement in the present.”
Unlike some members of his party he does not criticize just for the sake of criticism. When the External Affairs Minister took issue with the Khalistanis pulling our flag down outside the Indian embassy, Tharoor supported him, saying, “India’s response was fitting…We are all Indians & all that matters should be our national interest.” But when Jaishankar was critical of Germany and the US for commenting on Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification, stating that the West doesn’t have a “God Given right to comment on the internal matters of other countries”, Tharoor asked him to “Cool a little bit” and “not be so thin-skinned”.
His tweets cover a wide range of topics—from the Hindu way to life, to Ambedkar, the Russia-Ukraine war to British colonialism. His sharp takedowns of British colonialism, often done on British soil, have done India proud. Take a recent one at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Spain, where he compared the British to “mafia gang lords. They went to the ruling class and said you have to pay us to protect you from us or we will attack you.”
While his comments tend to go viral on social media, he is however not a regular at the briefing podium at 24 Akbar Road (Congress headquarters). However, as the current president of the All India Professional Congress (pending Kharge’s reshuffle), Tharoor uses this platform to reach out to the professionals and the youth. A recent podcast was on World MSME Day (trust Tharoor to know that there is such a day).
During the UPA years, Tharoor held the education portfolio and he often speaks of the need to combine academic learning with entrepreneurial skills. Last month, while speaking at the silver jubilee of the St Mary’s Higher Secondary School, he told the children the story about the chess grandmaster S.L.
Narayanan, who at age 12 refused a walkover against an Egyptian grandmaster whose flight had been delayed, saying that he would rather play the grandmaster than win by default. Apart from being a good lesson for the kids, S.L. Narayanan, a school alumnus, was in the audience at the time.
It’s not all policy and politics on his Twitter feed; there are umpteen selfies with his many readers, and the many mentions of times when “demand has outstripped supply” leading to his books running out at literature festivals. This is just Tharoor being in love with the idea of Being Tharoor.
A favourite topic remains his home state, Kerala which gets a special mention ever so often, whether it’s a flood in his constituency or the fact that he has spent 100% of his MPLADS fund. Sometimes the mentions are a bit forced, such as when he took issue with the BCCI for not allotting a match or two to the Cricket Stadium in Thiruvananthapuram for the 2023 World Cup.
A few months ago, Tharoor had expressed a desire to contest the 2026 state elections which led to a panic reaction within the Kerala Congress. Fearing that he might have chief ministerial ambitions, many of his colleagues, from the all-powerful organisational general secretary, K.C. Venuogopal, to the more local and vocal Ramesh Chennithala, turned against him. Later, while speaking at the 146th Mannam Jayanti to celebrate the birth anniversary of the founder of the Nair Service Society in Kottayam, Tharoor recalled that Mannathu Padmanabhan Pillai had observed that one Nair cannot acknowledge another Nair, and added wryly, “he said it a hundred years ago but I often see that in politics”.
Interestingly Tharoor is a Nair himself, as are Venugopal and Chennithala.
Well, one thing is for sure. Agree or disagree with him, Shashi Tharoor is rarely boring.