Shashi Tharoor and his critical takes — the latest being on the Emergency — have led to renewed swipes from within from his party Congress, deepening questions about his future plans.
A day after Tharoor mentioned “cruelty” inflicted on the poor during the Emergency imposed during Indira Gandhi's regime in 1975, Congress MP Manickam Tagore resumed not-so-veiled digs at Tharoor.
"When a colleague starts repeating BJP lines word for word, you begin to wonder — Is the bird becoming a parrot? Mimicry is cute in birds, not in politics," Tagore posted on X.
Further, from Tharoor's home state of Kerala, which goes to polls next year, a senior Congress leader was more direct, asking him to pick a side.
“He should first decide which party he belongs to,” K Muraleedharan said, after Tharoor, four-time MP from Kerala, shared a private firm's survey that said he was the most preferred choice for chief minister in the state.
BJP links it to Rahul Gandhi's Bihar protest
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the opportunity to attack the Congress for “nursing the same mindset that brought Emergency”.
{{/usCountry}}The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took the opportunity to attack the Congress for “nursing the same mindset that brought Emergency”.
{{/usCountry}}It pointed towards Rahul Gandhi's protest in Bihar against the Election Commission's ongoing revision of electoral rolls, too, as a sign. “It underscores the opposition party's belief that constitutional bodies' legitimacy depends on its poll victory or loss," BJP national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi said, as per a PTI report.
Also read: SC grills EC over voters list revision: ‘Why not Aadhaar?’
The latest barbs are flying after Shashi Tharoor's opinion piece — written for a Malayalam daily Deepika — denouncing the Emergency as a dark chapter in Indian democracy.
Tharoor shared the piece in English on his X account, too, in which he wrote about how the country responded to the excesses of that period by voting Indira Gandhi out of power by a large margin in 1977.
Rahul Gandhi and the party have called the Emergency a mistake in recent years.
What Tharoor said on ‘cruelty’, Sanjay Gandhi
Tharoor, in his article, recalled how Indira Gandhi's son Sanjay Gandhi — Rahul's late uncle — led actions that inflicted cruelty in the name of discipline, particularly “the forced vasectomy campaigns led by Gandhi’s son, Sanjay, and concentrated in poorer and rural areas, where coercion and violence were used to meet arbitrary targets”.
BJP's Trivedi commented that even after a Congress leader took 50 years realise the excesses of Emergency, reaction from within the party showed that it “continues to shamelessly support the extreme measure… and the mindset behind it”.
Tharoor, even before this article, has been in the crosshairs of his party leaders, particularly for his praise of PM Narendra Modi's foreign policy measures.
Tharoor's place in the Congress
In more recent times, Tharoor has been measured in his response about the BJP's ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), even as Rahul Gandhi has been ballistic against it.
A sticking point emerged also when Tharoor — a former global diplomat who was a minister for external affairs in Manmohan Singh's cabinet — was chosen by the BJP-led NDA government to be a leader in the Operation Sindoor outreach delegations sent to foreign countries to present India's position after cross-border hostilities with Pakistan.
The party expressed reservations about not being asked to nominate members on its own.
Tharoor had contested the Congress presidential elections in 2022, losing to Mallikarjun Kharge who was seen as the Gandhi family's choice.