Following his remarks that Congress's student outreach did not resonate with the students as much as the Cockroach party's paper leak protests did, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Saturday sought to explain his stand, decrying that the media was interpreting it as "an attack on my own party or its leadership".
Tharoor insisted that he was stressing that political parties must open their doors and create pathways for the next generation to gain the power to shape politics.
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This comes after Tharoor said during an event in Maharashtra that all opposition parties have to be conscious of the fact that they didn't "provide a route into our parties for the kinds of people who are at Jantar Mantar last month".
The established parties will cease to be relevant unless they can listen to the new voices that they haven't heard so far, he remarked.
Tharoor noted that Rahul Gandhi's 'Chhatron ki goonj' programme had raised the issue of paper leaks and other issues central to students even before the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) announced the mass protest.
{{/usCountry}}Tharoor noted that Rahul Gandhi's 'Chhatron ki goonj' programme had raised the issue of paper leaks and other issues central to students even before the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) announced the mass protest.
{{/usCountry}}Agreeing on the fact that Congress' student outreach programme did not ‘resonate’ as much as the CJP's protest, Tharoor said, “We need to ask ourselves what did we fail to do? Did we fail to listen? Was our finger missing from the pulse of the Gen Z?”
But Tharoor later claimed that his remarks had been distorted in the media.
"It takes a particular combination of incompetence and malice for some media to interpret my conversation with Rishabh Shah at @iimunofficial as an attack on my own party or its leadership.
"Here is the entire video, uncut and unexpurgated, in full, of the conversation. Watch it and judge for yourself, as clearly none of the Journalists distorting it have done," Tharoor said in a post on X.
Tharoor, the Lok Sabha member from Thiruvananthapuram, also shared his entire conversation at the India's International Movement to Unite Nations (IIMUN) in Mumbai on August 7.
Tharoor's office also shared a video of a part of his conversation and said, "Context is often more instructive than commentary. Beyond the noise lies Dr Shashi Tharoor's point: India's young people must not remain spectators to politics. Parties must open their doors, create pathways to leadership and give the next generation the power to shape our politics".
Rahul Gandhi, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, launched the Chhatron Ki Goonj campaign from Rajasthan's Kota on June 17. The initiative later moved to Dehradun, where Gandhi interacted with students and families affected by alleged examination irregularities.
Gandhi has held the Chhatro ki Goonj campaign in several cities across the country since then, in parallel to the CJP's protest against paper leaks which it announced on June 20.
While the protesters camped at the Jantar Mantar protest site till Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation as the Union education minister, the Congress also held a protest outside the PM's residence.