Shashi Tharoor says he did not join Congress for lifelong career

Shashi Tharoor said that Congress members could not sacrifice the ideas of inclusive and progressive India merely for seats or votes.

A day after senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor stressed that the answer to the party’s woes in Hindi heartland does not lie in “majority appeasement” or offering some sort of a “Hindutva Lite” like a “Coke Lite” which would reduce it to “Congress Zero”, he said that he did not join the Congress for a lifelong career.

Congress MP Shahshi Tharoor said he joined the Congress because he believed it was he best vehicle for advancement of the ideas of inclusive and progressive India.(ANI)

“I did not come to Congress party because I had any lifelong career here. I came because I believed it is the best vehicle for advancement of the ideas of inclusive and progressive India. We cannot sacrifice those ideas merely for seats or votes,” he said at a Youth Congress function in New Delhi on Monday.

Tharoor’s latest comment seems to be in continuation of the Hindutva Lite” remark on Sunday following suggestions by some from both within and outside the party that it needs to counter the BJP narrative of “minority appeasement” and go soft on its secularism refrain after the hammering in the Lok Sabha elections last summer where it won only 52 seats.

The Congress MP has had his hands full recently fighting battles on various fronts. On August 31, the Delhi police asked a city court to frame charges of abetment to suicide against him in the case related to death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar in 2014.

Earlier that week, he had been involved in a spat with the Congress unit in Kerala unit which alleged that he had praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he endorsed another Congress leader Jairam Ramesh’s statement that demonizing Modi won’t help the opposition.

On August 13, a Kolkata court issued an arrest warrant against Tharoor for a remark he had made last year regarding the formation of a ‘Hindu Pakistan’ if the BJP won the Lok Sabha elections.