Tharoor’s latest is not a book, but a Congress pamphlet on PM Modi

Tharoor’s failure to look at Narendra Modi dispassionately makes it his weakest book in recent times.

With a book titled The Paradoxical Prime Minister, one may assume Shashi Tharoor has taken a cue from Sanjaya Baru, who had written a controversial, but much successful book, The Accidental Prime Minister, based on his experiences as Manmohan Singh’s media adviser. Tharoor, however, has never enjoyed any such affinity with Narendra Modi and he doesn’t make any pretence either, confessing in the book how the two met for the first time as late as in 2009.

“I knew of Mr Modi only from the media, and what I knew was not flattering,” he writes while recalling his chance encounter during a Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas event in January 2009. Tharoor came out impressed after the meeting where he asked how little the then Gujarat Chief Minister had done for Muslims. Modi responded in his own characteristic style, saying he hadn’t done anything for Hindus as well. “I have only worked for Gujaratis,” he replied.

Yet, as the book’s title suggests, the admiration didn’t last long. Tharoor, in fact, begins The Paradoxical Prime Minister with an “I told you so” statement, remembering his December 2014 book where he fathomed, and feared, the Modi paradox. “There’s a paradox at the heart of Modi’s ascent to the prime ministership,” he had then written then in India Shashtra.

Tharoor, thanks to his polished writing skills and equally admirable argumentative qualities, makes a good case. For, there definitely is a paradox in Narendra Modi’s promises and delivery. He is spot on when he exposes how out of 51,738 MoUs worth more than Rs 84 lakh crore signed during the Vibrant Gujarat summits, investment came in at just about 10% of the pledges. That Modi “runs a parliamentary system in a presidential style”, despite his numerous public posturing in support of federalism. That “not everyone in the BJP, or even in the RSS, is not entirely happy with Modi”, though never before has any other Prime Minister worn Hindutva on his sleeve so comfortably and effortlessly. For him ancient Hindu texts are the repository of all human wisdom, and yet he is a firm believer in modern science and technology.

This book is full of such “paradoxes”. But Tharoor falters, and falters big time, when he assumes that these absurdities are just Modi-centric. A former Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, once said of all politicians, “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.” What’s being projected as the Modi paradox can equally be the case with any other Prime Minister, past or present. To attain power the political class worldwide makes a “poetry” of promises. And in power, it invariably takes to the drab, monotonous and arduous “prose” of governance.

Let’s take identity politics, for instance. Won’t it be a travesty of history to confine the malaise of paradoxes to Modi alone, especially when much serious charges can be levelled against the likes of Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, when they were in power? From the Punjab insurgency to the Shah Bano case and from the opening of the Ram temple doors to the blatant banning of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the list is long, dismal and distressing. Even Rahul Gandhi’s silence on Sabarimala and the Congress-led Punjab government’s blasphemy law is no less unsettling.

Tharoor is also silent on the dubious role played by his own partymen in the rise of Hindutva. The culture of minority appeasement—practised and perfected by the Congress for vote-bank politics—distorted secularism and gave it a bad name. Hindutva, which Tharoor rightly says is an attempt to blindly ape Semitic religions, was primarily the result of a backlash to such anti-majoritarian sentiments. So much so that the Ramakrishna Mission once sought the tag of a “minority institution”!

The author mocks Modi’s mother-of-all-surgeries statement vis-à-vis Lord Ganesh, but falls for “negationist” tendencies—the most obvious being his disavowal for Sir Vidia Naipaul’s assessment of India being a “wounded civilisation”. He, to prove this point, goes to the extent of “sanitising” Aurangzeb, based on selective observations of historians like Audrey Truschke. It is ironical to see Indian liberals rooting for Aurangzeb, especially after Sir Jadunath Sircar exposing the Islamist tendencies of the last of the great Mughals, when there have been a better alternative in Dara Sikoh.

Tharoor mentions an interesting anecdote—sadly a rarity in the book—when Modi opens up to him to let others peep into his inner self. In a one-on-one conversation in late 2017, Modi tells Tharoor, “You know, in some parts of India, if a man of low caste sports a moustache or dares to ride a horse, he is beaten up by the high castes for his presumption. That’s what is happening to me. Some people will never accept that a man like me is the Prime Minister of India. That’s why they keep attacking me.”

This should have been a right opportunity for Tharoor to look into the mind of Modi. Why he behaves the way he does vis-à-vis traditional politicians and media—showing utter disdain and distrust for the two. Interestingly, foreign biographers could analyse the phenomenon more succinctly. Andy Marino, Modi’s authorised biographer, is a case in point. So is Lance Price, a British journalist, who adopts a sympathetic approach in his book, The Modi Effect. “Modi has reasons to be wary of writers and journalists. Few politicians in India have faced such a barrage of personal attacks as he (Modi) has done since his first days as public figure,” he writes. Even Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a nuanced biographer of Modi, while recalling the much talked-about Modi walkout from Karan Thapar’s TV show, blames the anchor for “obviously playing to the gallery of Modi-baiters” by asking a “pungent question at the onset”, which would have “put off most political leaders”.

Tharoor’s failure to look at Modi dispassionately makes it his weakest book in recent times. Even in the last book, Why I am a Hindu, which came out as early as this January itself, Tharoor, the intellectual, makes a wonderful edifice of arguments, which ironically he destroys in the second half of the volume where he dons the robe of a politician. In The Paradoxical Prime Minister, however, he doesn’t even pretend to be an intellectual. He is an out and out politician, and that too a Congress one. Read this book only if you are a Tharoor fan.