The Weekly Vine Teaser: The Shashi Tharoor Conundrum
The Salman Khan of literary fests, Tharoor is the darling of Lutyens book launches, elite drawing rooms, and Twitter debates, where verbosity is a virtue.
Many years ago, an insouciant young man from St. Stephen’s participated in an inter-college debate at IIT Kanpur, where some of his incendiary comments infuriated certain natives of IIT with such alacrity that they wished to enforce their right to parliamentary rebuttal through non-verbal gestures. At least, that’s how my pater remembers it. The young man’s name was Shashi Tharoor.
Today, he is India’s most celebrated polysyllabic orator and thesaurus enthusiast—an odd fit in the Congress party, a relationship best described as a reluctant arranged marriage where neither side can quite decide whether they want a divorce.
The Salman Khan of literary fests, Tharoor is the darling of Lutyens book launches, elite drawing rooms, and Twitter debates, where verbosity is a virtue. His admirers believe Congress would be far better off under a leader who speaks the King’s English with finesse rather than struggling through press conferences. Yet, despite his intellectual sheen, his relationship with the Congress high command has been, at best, uneasy.
Tharoor has made a career out of being the party’s resident outlier. His 2022 decision to challenge Mallikarjun Kharge for the Congress presidency was less a bid for power and more an intellectual experiment—one that did little to endear him to the party’s old guard. His occasional praise of the Modi government’s policies, whether on foreign affairs or infrastructure, has only deepened suspicions. If that wasn’t enough, his recent selfie with BJP minister Piyush Goyal and UK Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds sent Congress loyalists into a minor meltdown.
And then there’s Kerala, where his popularity is both a blessing and a migraine for Congress. His bipartisan stance on economic development has irked the state unit, which prefers its politics served old-school—without any of this reformist, “let’s work together” nonsense.
Outside politics, Tharoor remains the literary world’s favourite Congress leader, having authored over 20 books, from The Great Indian Novel to Why I Am a Hindu, proving that he can argue both for and against his party’s existence with equal eloquence.
But let’s be real: there’s absolutely no evidence to support the oft-repeated lament that Congress would be better off under Shashi Tharoor. That’s just a fantasy peddled by the self-important, self-referential, and often self-serving English commentariat, which still clings to the colonial-era notion that the grand old party must be ruled by a man who minds his Ps and Qs and speaks with a clipped accent. There’s little evidence of that having any resemblance to reality.
Read the full Vine on Linkedin.