Being Shashi Tharoor

MOST PARTIES PREFER ventriloquism to free speech within. Certainly so within a party that, lost in the wilderness, struggles to be enlightened by the soliloquies of its leader, who has not yet succeeded in finding a motif more useful than Modi to keep the narrative flow. Then comes along a Shashi Tharoor, the independence and ingenuity of his mind tend to provoke rather than please the so-called High Command, which continues to be fed on fealty.

Tharoor’s crime was challenging what is blindly revered in politics-as-usual: consensus. In the beginning, if we return to history, consensus only meant enforced obedience to the Leader who knew better. It was the acceptance of the inevitable in systems built on fear and exclusion, presided over by the greatest hallucinators of history. Today, in democracies, consensus is a synonym for convenience, which demands a curtailment of conscience even when unsolicited sanity can save the day, and in the case of Rahul Gandhi’s Congress, postpone redundancy.

Tharoor, quite mistakenly in retrospect, thought ‘national interest’ was not incompatible with ‘leadership interest’. He also refused to mime his leader in his analysis of India under Narendra Modi. There was nothing brazen or daring when he acknowledged the national gain from the prime minister’s recent visit to Trump’s America. Not to suffer from Modi Derangement Syndrome was to deviate from the path, nothing short of subversion. What’s more, as an MP from Kerala, where he has already acquired the status of the ideal candidate in middle-class minds, he did not even spare the ruling Marxists from his praise. Blasphemer.

Knowingly or not, Tharoor is in a culture war, and every wound he valiantly bares in the public square is a testament to his individual decency and intellectual integrity. In the political world he inhabits, this conviction in ideas he genuinely believes will enhance his party makes him an outsider, a lone idealist among apparatchiks. He finds himself pitted against a leadership that mistakes the audacity of opinion for insubordination, the intellectual courage to question suitable certainties for naïveté.

Tharoor is not one of them, schooled in a culture of submission. His difference lies in the making of his political career, which, to many of his colleagues’ surprise, is a chosen phase of his professional life. Author, public speaker, social media cult, he cannot resist an argument. And why should he? The writer politician, the poet as legislator, even if all of them do not live up to the standards of the philosopher king, is not an all-too-unfamiliar figure in Indian politics. One of Tharoor’s ideals fits the bill nicely, though Nehru in today’s India might find little from his own texts to defend himself. The world Tharoor unravels through his imagination and scholarship is a world he has not abandoned in his political life. Arguments alone redeem politics, no matter Tharoor has to report to a leader for whom the sum of his statements, ranging from the aggressive to the anodyne, amounts to an existential struggle to discover himself in an India beholden to Modi. The autonomy of Tharoor’s mind is bound to be an anomaly in Congress’ house of delusions.

It was this autonomy that provided his party with the legitimacy of internal democracy when Tharoor contested for the Congress presidency. He could not have won a position that is nothing but a medium for the party’s highest deities of deliverance. He won the moral argument by just being there in the fray, as an elegant expression of democratic impulses in India’s oldest political tradition. He was not a rebel; he was just upholding the principle that in-house dissent is not necessarily mutiny. He dared to be the moderniser in a moribund system—and ended up as Congress’ equivalent of a counterrevolutionary.

Congress’ misreading of Tharoor only vindicates how the best and the brightest will remain a necessary burden in an organisation that has failed to keep pace with India. Everything about India has changed, and it takes a new set of arguments to make the idea of an alternative even rhetorically feasible. The sole soliloquiser or the accompanying band of ventriloquists can only strengthen the illusion of an opposition, not the reality of a rejoinder. Shashi Tharoor is armed with arguments, the power and sophistication of which can make his party more acceptable.

CongressCongress cultureIndian democracyleadershipNarendra ModiRahul GandhiShashi Tharoor