Quo vadis, Shashi Tharoor?

Speculation is ripe regarding Tharoor’s motivation to take positions at odds with the Congress party’s official line.

The Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram has managed to ruffle both the Congress central leadership and the Kerala unit with his latest ‘balancing act’ of sorts. While it was Tharoor’s praise for Prime Minister Modi’s United States visit that annoyed the party’s top brass, an Op-Ed he wrote in The New Indian Express on the state’s encouraging performance on the start-up front has blown up in Kerala.

As usual, speculation is ripe regarding Tharoor’s motivation to take positions at odds with the Congress party’s official line. This took another turn when Tharoor’s Facebook post commemorating the Youth Congress victims of the Periya political murders was rephrased to remove the word ‘cannibal’ from it, as well as reference to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI-M].

While Tharoor has often taken a bipartisan approach on issues of development and foreign policy, the timing of the latest controversy has set tongues wagging as he has gradually slipped down the pecking order among those hoping to assume the chief minister’s position in Kerala in 2026. And despite making it to the much-coveted Congress Working Committee (CWC), Tharoor hasn’t been delegated additional responsibilities in the party.

This was not the case not too long ago.

When Tharoor was the next big hope of Congress

Following the Congress rout in the 2021 assembly polls in Kerala—where the Left bucked a four-decade-old tradition of revolving door politics—a massive public outcry to pitch Tharoor as the face of state Congress followed. And the diplomat-turned-politician seemed game, ratcheting up participation in public events and becoming more visible across the state.

Tharoor was also seen as someone who could start on a clean state and appeal to the divergent sections backing the Congress. Many stakeholders within the larger Congress ecosystem felt that Tharoor could balance the aspirations of the Christian and Muslim minorities, despite simmering issues between them.

This was a time when the Christian community in the state felt orphaned by the passing of KM Mani and Oommen Chandy. When Tharoor came to deliver the annual KM Chandy memorial lecture in Pala in December 2022, Cyriac Thomas, the former vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, introduced the Thiruvananthapuram MP as Kerala’s chief minister-in-waiting—to rapturous applause.

Tharoor was also invited to inaugurate the Mannam Jayanthi celebrations at the Nair Service Society (NSS) headquarters, where he found further endorsement. Tharoor also got the backing of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a vital component of the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) in Kerala, at the same time.

Tharoor’s popularity in Kerala only grew when he threw his hat into the ring for Congress presidency, even as it raised his stature in national politics. Tharoor’s contest against Kharge was seen in a positive light, as it gave the Congress a rare opportunity to brag about inner-party democracy. And Tharoor was duly nominated as a full-time member of the CWC by Kharge, over the claims of veterans such as Ramesh Chennithala.

Wrong-footed by views on Hamas

All this build-up, however, came crashing down in a rare moment of indiscretion.

At a gigantic Palestine solidarity rally organised by the IUML on Kozhikode beach, Tharoor couldn’t resist referring to the Hamas as terrorists—while balancing out Israel’s aggression in Palestine. A lot of his well-wishers had apparently advised Tharoor to take a more disingenuous approach, but he felt it would misrepresent his long- standing position.

In no time, the Left ecosystem in Kerala backed by the intelligentsia and a section of the media portrayed Tharoor as an Israeli agent, and he lost his mass appeal among Malabar Muslims in its wake.

This was followed by his abrupt removal from chairmanship of the All India Professionals Congress (AIPC), without notice. A peeved Tharoor wrote to the delegates in its wake, bidding farewell through an email, where he recalled how the AIPC was his brainchild, conceived from an eight-page concept note he wrote Sonia Gandhi in 2009.

It is assumed that the Congress leadership was taken aback by Tharoor winning over a thousand Congress delegates in the internal election, and it located the AIPC as having given Tharoor a platform to secure it.

The present

The 2024 Lok Sabha polls turned out to be a much harder battle for Tharoor than initially anticipated. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who used his investment in Republic TV to target Tharoor for years, reckoned that Thiruvananthapuram in 2024 was ripe for the plucking—although the Latin Christian community once again bailed out the incumbent. Tharoor gave enough indications before and after the contest that it would be his final bid to the Lok Sabha from Kerala’s capital.

While Tharoor remains one of the leading voices for Congress in the Lok Sabha, he isn’t too happy about the washouts and lack of debate in the lower house lately. Congress under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership seems to make up for its lack of organisational muscle on the streets through disruptions in parliament—marginalising the role of individuals like Tharoor.

Mani Shankar Aiyar was in Thiruvananthapuram recently to attend a literature festival where he was asked about the party not designating a role for Tharoor—to which the Congress veteran responded that it was actually the party’s loss.

Tharoor’s political career seems to have hit a rough patch even as the prospects of Congress look bleak nationally in the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean Tharoor has options beyond the Congress, in the current state of affairs.

As Vajpayee is known to have famously ruminated in the late-‘80s, “Jaye to jaye kahan?” (If I must go, where can I go?).