L'affaire Shashi Tharoor

Of probity and provincialism

Nobody who is caught with his hand in the till ever admits to his guilt till proven guilty in a court of law; all sense of decency and honour, dignity and respect, evaporates and yields space to belligerence followed by maudlin sentiments of hurt innocence. So also with the disgraced former Minister of State for External Affairs who once famously tweeted to me that he was proud to be associated with the Congress because of its “tolerance” and “liberal values”.

That was in response to my tweet (not the one on 'cattle class' travel which led to his first taste of controversy!) pointing out his irreverent comments about Mrs Indira Gandhi and the Congress’s first family (“Had Indira’s Parsi husband been a Toddywalla rather than so conveniently a Gandhi, I sometimes wonder, might India’s political history have been different?”) in his book India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond. This was soon after Mr Jaswant Singh’s unceremonious exit from the BJP following the publication of his book Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence and Mr Tharoor was all over Twitter, patronisingly gloating over a veteran politician’s fall from grace in his party.

For all its ‘tolerance’ and ‘liberal values’, the Congress has not been particularly tolerant about Mr Tharoor’s extra-ministerial activities or liberal towards his cavalier attitude. When push came to shove, the Congress disowned him and distanced itself from his interest in promoting T20 cricket in Kochi. It would be in bad form and poor taste to gloat over Mr Tharoor’s current plight, but it would be perfectly in order to point out that arrivistes in politics should resist the temptation of excessive preening.

It is not the least surprising that Mr Tharoor, whose Dubai-based fiancée was a beneficiary by way of free ‘sweat’ equity worth Rs 70 crore from IPL’s Kochi franchise deal (hours before he was given marching orders she offered to return the shares which only served to implicate him) should have pretended outrage, flown into a temper with journalists, belligerently asserted that under no circumstances would he resign from office, only to be told to put in his papers last Sunday evening. He has now predictably resorted to mawkish claims of victimhood.

Reading out a statement in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, Mr Tharoor declared, though not for the first time, “My conscience is clear and I know that I have done nothing improper or unethical, let alone illegal… I am deeply wounded by the fanciful and malicious charges that have been made against me.” We have heard similar remonstrations of innocence before by those accused of compromising their integrity.

He could have, however, spared us the claim that he resigned from the Union Council of Ministers to uphold the “highest moral traditions of our democratic system” and to “avoid embarrassment to the Government”. He did not resign voluntarily when unsavoury details (including those of his role which went well beyond that of a neutral ‘mentor’) of the IPL’s Kochi franchise scandal surfaced in media, which would have been the honourable thing to do; he was told to go by his party bosses. Had he resigned immediately, or at least offered to resign, rather than arrogantly cavil at the suggestion that he should do so to uphold the “highest moral traditions of our democratic system” he now cites, his reputation might have been tarred but it would not have been lying in tatters today.

Nor is any purpose served by his informing the Lok Sabha that he has “requested the Prime Minister to have these charges (against him) thoroughly investigated”. Whatever else may be the Prime Minister’s shortcomings, and he has many, he is not known to be a man who acts in haste. Neither is Mr Pranab Mukherjee known for arriving at a decision without carefully scrutinising and considering all available facts. A formal inquiry should be conducted into l’affaire Shashi Tharoor, but irrespective of its findings, which cannot possibly controvert the facts of the case, the smooth-talking former Minister would do well to bear in mind that in politics perception matters more than reality and the past is often, if not always, swamped by the present. Politics is a harsh world far removed from the rarefied confines of the UN headquarters in New York.

It would, however, be churlish to deny Mr Tharoor the right to defend himself and clear his name; others with a far lower integrity quotient have been given that opportunity. After all, as he has eloquently pointed out in his statement in the Lok Sabha, he has “a long record of public service unblemished by the slightest tint of financial irregularity”. That he served the UN under Mr Kofi Annan, who will be remembered as a Secretary-General who fetched immense disrepute to the organisation and whose son was found to have benefited from UN contracts, is inconsequential. Although it could be asked as to whether his conscience troubled him every time media reported about Mr Annan’s, or his son Kojo’s, dubious deeds. Of course, the perks of office can have a numbing effect on the conscience of the most honest person, as can the loaves and fishes of office.

What is reprehensible is Mr Tharoor’s attempt — there’s nothing covert or sly about it — to provoke provincial resentment against his sacking from the Government. No doubt he has been elected to the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram, but he was a Minister in the Government of India, not the Government of Kerala. As an MP, he is tangentially responsible for minding the interests of his constituency as his primary job is to participate in parliamentary debates on national affairs and help frame laws on national issues. As a member of the Union Council of Ministers, his remit was to mind India’s foreign affairs.

By repeatedly referring to Thiruvananthapuram and Kerala, the “ethos of Kerala”, the people of Kerala (with whom he had no association at all during his growing up years in Kolkata and Delhi and the many decades he spent at the UN) he has tried to link high issues of ministerial probity with low politics of provincial identity. The unstated though clear message he has sought to send out is that an elected representative of Kerala is being unjustly penalised. That’s balderdash and Mr Tharoor, more than anybody else, knows it.

It’s strange that a suave, accomplished person with an impressive track record of serving an international organisation with distinction, and whose last tweet sent out at 11.16 pm on April 16 reads, “U folks are the new India. We will ‘be the change’ we wish to see in our country,” should fall back on the discredited ‘old’ politics of provincial pride and prejudice in his time of trouble. That’s as distressing as his fiancée benefiting from a cricket franchise deal that he ‘mentored’.

(My blog on the mess called IPL/BCCI will appear soon. And no, I am not a fan of Lalit K Modi nor do I fly the flag for IPL.)

[This appeared as the main edit page article in The Pioneer on April 21, 2010.]

Twittering about Shashi’s tweet

It won’t surprise me at all if Mr Shashi Tharoor is hopping mad at me. But for my question, asked without any malicious intent, he would not have got into trouble with his party bosses and the Congress would not have gone into a tizzy. Let’s rewind to Monday, September 14. While scanning the Twitter-world from my TweetDeck I spotted our Minister of State for External Affairs exuberantly tweeting about his “fortnightly golgappas & chhole bature at Bengali Sweet House” and how he “was assailed by cameras”. Now that’s in keeping with party-dictated austerity in these hard times, I told myself, and dashed off a tweet addressed to him, which read, “@ShashiTharoor Tell us Minister, next time you travel to Kerala, will it be cattle class?” I must admit that I was quite surprised to receive a tweet from him in reply: “@KanchanGupta Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!” I imagined him having a hearty laugh while typing out the tweet; I had a good laugh, too. And then forgot all about it.

On September 16, the tweets exchanged between Mr Tharoor and me were reproduced on the front page of Indian Express, although I was not identified as the person who posed the question. The newspaper also had an editorial on his seemingly casual comment on austerity made in a flamboyant, offhandish manner. Predictably, the Congress’s spokesperson — Ms Jayanthi Natarajan was briefing the Press that afternoon — was asked to comment on Mr Tharoor’s tweet and, equally predictably, she launched a broadside against him. The use of the phrase ‘cattle class’ had hugely upset the party, she told mediapersons, and such callous disregard for sensitivities was not acceptable. By then Mr Tharoor had left for an official visit to Liberia and Ghana, and couldn’t have possibly been summoned for an explanation. Sniffing for a story in an otherwise silly season, newspapers and news channels went to town with the Congress’s response to Mr Tharoor’s tweet. The rest is, as the cliché goes, history.

It is not for me to defend either Mr Tharoor or his party’s reaction; having knowingly stepped into what Amitabh Bachchan colourfully described as the “cess pool” of politics, he should know how to look after himself; if he doesn’t, tough luck. But I do get the sense, as do many other fellow journalists, that our ebullient first time MP-turned-Minister in a high profile Ministry has rubbed too many of his party colleagues the wrong way. Politicians who have worked their way up the ladder don’t take to paratroopers kindly, especially when the latter grab disproportionate media attention. What has also worked against Mr Tharoor is that he has been at the centre of a series of controversies which, for any other politician, would have proved to be disastrous. Not so for Mr Tharoor: On each occasion he has craftily used the media to portray himself as the innocent victim of malicious conspiracies and diabolical plots. Years spent at the UN have taught him the art of converting adversity into advantage.

What life in the UN, where top bureaucrats are constantly trying to trip their colleagues to jump the queue, has clearly not taught Mr Tharoor is that politics isn’t about cutting deals in committee rooms or playing little games of one-upmanship. It is, therefore, not surprising that he should find himself in splendid isolation within his own party, with nobody, including fellow Congress MPs from Kerala, standing up for him as he is pitilessly pilloried by Ms Natarajan who is incensed, as are other Congress worthies, among them Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, over his inclusion of the expression ‘cattle class’ in his tweet. Nor is anybody particularly pleased that he feels compelled to travel ‘cattle class’ out of “solidarity with all our holy cows”. On Friday evening, the Prime Minister tried to come to Mr Tharoor’s rescue by stating the obvious: The tweet was a joke and need not be taken seriously. When asked for his comments, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi pointed out that the party (as opposed to the Prime Minister) had already made its position clear.

In an effort to keep the story going till something else comes up, newspapers and news channels are now busy speculating whether the Congress will take punitive action against Mr Tharoor; if yes, then when. Much of it could prove to be no more than idle speculation. But it would be a pity if he were to be punished for a tweet, no matter how cheekily offensive it may appear to our home-grown politicians. Mr Tharoor has said and written far worse to merit retribution for something which is at best a sarcastic comment on dubious austerity.

Ms Natarajan and her bosses are perhaps unaware of the contents of Mr Tharoor’s book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, in which he takes a rather dim view of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. He is particularly scathing about Mrs Indira Gandhi: “Had Indira’s Parsi husband been a Toddywalla (liquor trader) rather than so conveniently a Gandhi, I sometimes wonder, might India’s political history have been different?” According to Mr Tharoor, “Mrs Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or programme beyond the expedient campaign slogans; ‘remove poverty’ was a mantra without a method...” For him, Mrs Gandhi’s “visionless expediency” was her “only credo”. And on Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency he wrote: “Indira arrested opponents, censored the Press, and postponed elections. As a compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a ‘20-point programme’ for the uplift of the common man. (No one found it humorous enough to remark, as Clemenceau had done of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that ‘even the good Lord only had ten’.) Its provisions remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile, her thuggish younger son, Sanjay (1946-1980) emphasising two of the 20 points, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilisations.”

The book was published in 1997. He revised it 10 years later. Between 2007 and 2009, his views on the dynasty may have changed radically. That’s for him to say and prove. But what remains on record would have been considered sufficient by the Congress ‘high command’ to shut the doors on anybody else. Let us not forget that Mr Pranab Mukherjee, a diehard Indira loyalist, was expelled from the party in 1984 for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about Rajiv Gandhi’s elevation as Prime Minister following Mrs Gandhi’s tragic assassination. Others have found themselves out in the cold for far less and have twittered miserably to crawl back into favour. In Mr Tharoor’s case such transgressions have been overlooked. A tweet is nothing in comparison.

UPDATE [22/09/09]
Tharoor meets Sonia, PM, Pranab: Party asks him to be cautious
Shashi Tharoor met Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to give his explanation and was asked by the party to be cautious in his comments and actions. Soon after his return from Liberia and Ghana where he was on an official visit, Tharoor met Sonia Gandhi amid demands for his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs.Later he met Singh and senior Congress leader and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. He is understood to have given an explanation about his "cattle class" tweet. A glum-faced Tharoor did not speak to waiting mediapersons after his meetings with Sonia Gandhi and Mukherjee.Party spokesperson Shakeel Ahmed later said "any well-wisher of the party, Government and Tharoor will advise him to desist from any comments or action even jokingly that would hurt the sentiments of the common man." (PTI)