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HomeOpinionIndia is an election away from becoming Hindu Pakistan. But Kharge wants...

India is an election away from becoming Hindu Pakistan. But Kharge wants Congress status quo

I am not an unabashed admirer of Tharoor—I criticised his book on Hinduism—but he is the only Congress candidate with skill, stamina, principle to dynamise opposition.

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India’s transformation in the past eight years is not wholly a story of Narendra Modi’s triumphs. It is also a story of the Congress party’s collapse. The rejuvenation of India’s once-dominant political party is imperative to the success of any effort to dislodge Modi’s Hindu-first behemoth from office. This is why the vote to elect a new Congress leader is more than the party’s internal affair. Who wins the poll may determine who becomes the next prime minister. A revived Congress will not quite annihilate the Bharatiya Janata Party. But simply denying Modi an outright majority in Parliament is as good as finishing him off: The prime minister, having never lost an election in his career, cannot last without absolute power.

Both the candidates contending for the presidency of Congress—Mallikarjun Kharge and Shashi Tharoor—are deeply impressive figures.


The Kharge wall of status quo

Consider Kharge. Born into a Dalit family, he forged a formidable political career in defiance of the ancient prejudices of a society that treats people of his origin as so “impure” that it places them beyond the hierarchical caste structure. I remember being introduced to him as a child at a function in the latter half of the 1990s, when Congress was out of power and national newspapers were replete with racist reflections on Sonia Gandhi’s “foreignness”, and feeling awed by his rhetoric. Kharge’s career is a testament to his grit and tenacity. It is also a tribute to the redeeming promise of Indian democracy.

Today, as that democracy is exposed to mortal peril, Kharge is the candidate of an untenable status quo. It requires only a quick survey of his party—habituated to defeat, intellectually fatigued, financially destitute—to appreciate the danger of resisting sweeping change. But the Gandhi dynasty’s proximity and patronage have anaesthetised Kharge to the impending demise of his own party. India is an election away from becoming a Hindu Pakistan, but Kharge’s overarching priority is to perpetuate the dismal state of affairs in his party. His success would profit only a tiny minority—the establishment that turned up to nominate him—and he is their candidate.

In fact, we have not only had a glimpse of Kharge’s leadership; we are living with its consequences. As the Congress party’s leader in the Lok Sabha during Modi’s first term, he was the de facto head of the parliamentary opposition. In that role, he oversaw no reform within Congress and did nothing consequential outside it. The upshot: In the 2019 election, the BJP returned to power with an even bigger majority and Kharge lost his own seat.

Besides, a man born in the reign of George VI, the last Emperor of British India, is an odd choice for the leadership of a party that only a few years ago was pitching itself as the standard-bearer of India’s “youth”. Only a party that has squandered the capacity to learn even from its recent past, that exists to serve the interests of an oligarchy rather than the country, would fall behind Kharge’s candidacy.


Also read: Finally, this is a Rahul Gandhi that India can relate to


Tharoor—One of India’s finest MPs

The road to India’s reclamation goes via reform in the Congress party. And the candidate best placed to stimulate reform is Shashi Tharoor. This is not a view forged in veneration for the person, but a dispassionate assessment of his performance. His nearly three-decades-long service at the United Nations—where he distinguished himself by supervising a complex operation to rescue Vietnamese “boat people” refugees, helping to negotiate the end of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, and steering the modernisation of the communications of a maddeningly complex bureaucracy—culminated in his second-place finish to Ban Ki-moon in the 2006 race for the UN secretary-general. Tharoor lost that election despite being the most qualified applicant for the job because, then as now, a veto-wielding power feared him as a reformist.

Upon leaving the UN, Tharoor was swamped with offers of sinecures—university chancellorships, think tank chairs, and seats on boards—and speaking invitations with eye-watering fees attached to them. He turned them down, joined a private business that drove foreign investment into Kerala, and transitioned into a full-time politician. Once again, he rejected the easy ticket on offer—membership of the Rajya Sabha—to fight an election for the Lok Sabha. If his first election was the triumph of his constituents’ hope over his adversaries’ expectations, his subsequent victories—earned at the zenith of an anti-Congress mood—are a measure of his effectiveness as a representative.

Tharoor is one of India’s finest constituency MPs. In Parliament, he numbers among the most humane and industrious lawmakers. Since 2015, he has introduced nearly a dozen private member’s bills—among them draft legislation to safeguard domestic workers, fast-track justice for victims of lynching, abolish the death penalty, codify and simplify the grant of asylum to refugees, and provide protections against social discrimination. Tharoor is also his party’s most effective orator in English, and is infinitely more eloquent in Hindi than the longest-serving president of Congress.


Also read: 18 states & UTs and counting, Bharat Jodo — Kharge leaves no stone unturned in Congress prez bid


Contempt won’t help India

None of this is even remotely reconcilable with the slur, mouthed by the embittered ghouls who predominate our television and newspapers and talking shops, that Tharoor is an out-of-touch elitist. There are quarters in India where merely to evince respect for Tharoor is to invite scorn and be dismissed as an “unserious” person. Some speak of Tharoor as though he were a 3D-printed punchbag stuffed with privilege—not a human being who has toiled hard to make his way in the world and land where he is. They brush aside the books, speeches, pamphlets, electioneering, mentoring, legislating, intervening—as if they are all a sham and not products of labour and conviction—and roll their eyes at any inoffensive mention of Tharoor.

It goes without saying that most of these know-alls will die without ever having accomplished a hundredth of what Tharoor has, but no amount of reciting facts can help in their presence. They feel contempt for Tharoor for rejecting the qualities they claim to despise in other politicians. Tharoor is unfailingly polite to them and does not look down upon them or condescend to them. This exacerbates their anger because, in the absence of any real justification for their rage, they have to admit the true source of their dudgeon: Envy. They hate Tharoor because, not to put too fine a point on it, they are jealous and feel small in his presence.

These people of course have no interest in winning elections, securing power, or wielding it to the benefit of the defenceless Indians tormented by this dispensation. Their sole fixation is feeling good about themselves. Modi’s depredations do not inspire them to action; they rouse them into self-satisfaction. After mauling Tharoor, they retreat into superior feelings of purity. They are like those parasitic idlers VS Naipaul wrote about in Guerrillas: “They grumbled … they echoed one another; they could become hysterical with visions of the country’s decay. And failure always lay with someone else: the people who spoke of the crisis were themselves placid, content with their functions, existing within their functions, trapped, part of what they railed against.”

If Modi has cited the Gandhis to discredit the secular nationalism that Congress claims to espouse, then India’s foes have invoked Modi to disparage the entire Indian national project as a hoax. A Tharoor presidency would instantly lend credibility to Indian democracy and instil hope in the effort to resuscitate it.

I write all of this not, I should restate, because I am an unabashed admirer of Tharoor’s or even because I agree with every belief he professes—I wrote a severely critical review of his book on Hinduism some years ago—but because he is the only candidate with the skill, imagination, principle, certitude, and stamina to unify and dynamise the opposition and lead a resolute fight for India against Modi in 2024. I write all of this because India matters to me. We should hope that it matters also to the 9,000 delegates, handpicked by the Gandhi family and its courtiers, who will cast their vote on Monday.

Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. He tweets @kapskom. Views are personal.

(Edited by Neera Majumdar)

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