What stands Shashi Tharoor in good stead

Shashi Tharoor has two qualities that mark him out from the run-of-the-mill politician, not excluding the Congressman or, if you like, the Congresswoman. First, he brazenly stakes claim to what he knows may not come to him. Second, he can bounce back from where his compatriots dump him. Don’t write off Tharoor.

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This scion of Tharoor Swaroopam, which once had ruling rights in Valluvanad, had enough of experience in international politics to know that he was not likely to be chosen UN Secretary-General. The United Nations, from whose secretariat he duly retired, in our time has been no more effective in its peace-keeping mission than was the Tharoor Swaroopam in warding off the onslaught of the Zamorin of Kozhikode. Haider Ali was in his time inducted in Tharoor’s abortive operations. Haider went beyond his brief. The soldier from Mysore set off a communal conflagration in Valluvanad. Tharoor has had to live down that bittersweet memory.

Conceivably, he would have been, if made the UN boss, the second-most learned Secretary-General after Dag Hammarskjold. His erudition and efficiency were not attributes in great demand. Positively, Tharoor won national exposure, though his so-called UN campaign ended in smoke. It cleared his road to Indian politics, inaugurating him as MP and minister, surprising and annoying career Congressmen who lived on some harebrained agenda.

Perhaps, Tharoor knows the global society, and its life’s mores, more intimately than life in India. His private life was watched with amusement and curiosity. Following his public brawl with his new wife, and her death in mysterious circumstances, weird stories were in circulation. Ambitious but petty know-alls in Congress corridors forecast the end of his future. Others, credited with a gift of political legerdemain, expected him to join another party. He is not weighed down by any ideological baggage. Disingenuously, he can chart his new course and give it a plausible explanation. But neither of it happened. Tharoor marked his time to emerge as the redeemer of the Congress organisation.

That prospect was probably what the mother and the son feared: someone else, someone other than their factotum, doing it well. A decade of the hegemony of the twosome has only provoked protest from various ranks or desertions by senior leaders. Never before has the party been in such dire need of stewardship. And never in recent memory has the choice of a new president been reduced to so murky an exercise. The game plan, in the event, looks so suspect.

Tharoor’s candidature was initially not taken as a serious proposal. He was viewed as no more than a lucky and loquacious MP from a coastal corner deep down south. Going by his gestures, not genuflections, Tharoor did not meet the requirements of a leader with undivided loyalty to the self-styled high command. It seemed the party had no one who could confidently don the president’s mantle, Tharoor alone being in the fray. He looked like the receptacle of its support and blessing when he was the lone serious candidate. Then, the issues were laid bare, the intentions exposed.

Digvijaya Singh emerged as a valid contestant, preparing the field for a direct fight between him and Tharoor. Unlike Tharoor, Digvijaya is an old guard, long exposed to the rough and tumble of Congressism. After Kamal Nath’s unilateral exit from the contest, Digvijaya’s entry seemed a virtual nomination by the high command. If that was what the high command wanted, that was what was going to happen, so went the surmise of many party-watchers. In the course of these less-than-transparent machinations, Tharoor was beginning to be seen as a candidate, more plain, ambitious and energetic than most. The imprimatur from the high command, letting him, if not exactly asking him, contest for the top party post gave an impression that he was a solid, happy choice. Wrong!

The mother and the son, and their hirelings, had other ideas, not easily revealed to those not initiated in the flattery fads of the Congress tradition. Instead of reconfirming the candidature of Tharoor, who had received open endorsement from different layers of the party in Kerala, they brought in an octogenarian Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge. Who can be trusted, who not, was the question. Anticipating the mind of the mother and the son, Tharoor’s early supporters seemed rather shaky. Some of them invented a theory that Tharoor was not a man of the masses. The fact is they like to see him out of their way.

What stands Tharoor in good stead is a combination of energy, erudition and efficiency — which is what the arthritic organisation needs more than ever before. Congress members, particularly younger workers not swayed by the provincial prejudices of ageing leaders, may not at last repose their full trust in the high command whose singular contribution to the party has been its steady emasculation. It is still possible to save the party, taking a political view beyond the interests of the high command.

For once, its command seems to sound low and hollow. When it let the old diplomat sans diplomacy try his lack of luck in the race for the top job, it did not expect him to give a feeble fight to its certified nominee. As it happens, it is proving to be more than a fight. No walk is, as they say, a cakewalk. How to reverse the walk is now the high command’s challenge.