Words are power. Words are magic. Words are fun. Words are sexy. Words can move you to tears. Words can make you laugh. And words can show you the world and everything in it with clarity and depth as few other things can.”
The blurb of Shashi Tharoor’s A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays, published by the Aleph Book Company, could not have been more apt. After all, who better than Tharoor, to reflect on the power that words hold?
In 2009, during the Congress-led UPA government’s austerity drive, Tharoor faced controversy after responding to a question about flying “cattle class” to Kerala.
His response—”Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”—sparked a political uproar. The Congress party quickly rebuked him, prompting Tharoor, a prolific author of several bestselling books on Indian society and politics, to clarify he meant no disrespect to economy class passengers.
Fast forward 16 years, Tharoor again finds himself in hot water over remarks made in a media interview. He was quoted as saying in Malayalam, “several workers feel there is an absence of a leader in Kerala’s Congress.”
On Thursday, Tharoor clarified that he had actually said, “We have many leaders, but many feel that there are no ordinary workers.” Tharoor also said in the course of the interview, “You should not think that I have no option to spend my time, I have options. I have my books, speeches, have invitations from all across the world for talks.”
His remarks were interpreted as a subtle message to the Congress high command—that he was considering political alternatives.
Tharoor now finds himself in the eye of a storm, with the top leaders of the Congress’s faction-ridden Kerala unit accusing him of “crossing the line” when the state is headed to Assembly elections next year.
This is why Shashi Tharoor is ThePrint Newsmaker of the Week.
In fact, the row over the interview only added fuel to the raging fire over Tharoor’s praise of the Left-led Kerala government’s new industrial policy in a newspaper column.
Tharoor had written that Kerala has forged a startup ecosystem that, at the end of an 18-month period last year, was valued at a whopping $1.7 billion, five times more than the global average during this same period.
“That this transformation has begun to occur under a Communist-led LDF government seems astonishing, but it is not entirely surprising. The Communists in Kerala, like their counterparts in West Bengal at the beginning of the century, understood that the path to growth and prosperity for their people lies in capitalism, entrepreneurship, and initiative, not in red flags, strikes, and agitations,” he wrote in the piece.
As leaders of the Kerala Congress attacked him over the piece, Tharoor defended himself, saying while he does not believe that the overall industrial climate of the state has changed, “when something good emerges, even if only in one area, it is petty not to acknowledge it”.
Also read: Ramesh Chennithala is getting a Nair rebranding. Kerala Congress targets Hindu votes
Tharoor’s journey
A former diplomat with the United Nations, Tharoor’s political journey with the Congress, from 2009 when he first won the Lok Sabha elections from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency, has been turbulent. Primarily owing to his propensity to make remarks that often did not align with the party’s official line.
But it’s not just words that land him in trouble time and again. In 2009, also during the UPA austerity drive, Tharoor, along with then External Affairs Minister SM Krishna, earned a rap on the knuckles from the government after it emerged that they were staying in a five-star hotel in Delhi as their official accommodation was not ready.
In 2010, the controversy over Sunanda Pushkar, his then girlfriend and later wife—being issued a sweat equity by a consortium that owned the Kochi team of the Indian Premier League cost Tharoor his berth in the council of ministers in the Manmohan Singh government. He was re-inducted as a junior minister in 2012.
In January 2014, months before the Lok Sabha elections, Pushkar was found dead in a plush hotel room in Delhi, plunging Tharoor into the deepest crisis of his career.
The Delhi Police booked him in a murder case, but a local court acquitted him in 2021. Despite facing multiple crises, Tharoor repeatedly proved his critics wrong by securing strong electoral support, defying the notion that he was just an elite figure without grassroots backing.
He has been elected MP from the Thiruvananthapuram seat, which has a strong presence of the BJP as well as the Left, four consecutive times between 2009 and 2024.
In 2023, he was also inducted as a member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making forum. In 2022, he also contested for the post of the president of the Congress, pitting himself against Mallikarjun Kharge, who, widely perceived to have the blessings of the Gandhi family, defeated Tharoor.
Also read: Where does Shashi Tharoor fit in Kerala Congress? His timing is always off
On the Nehru-Gandhi family
Tharoor, who describes himself as a “Liberal but not Leftist”, has repeatedly found his views on a range of issues—be it religion or foreign policy—at odds with that of the Congress high command or the Gandhi family.
Last year, Tharoor wrote a column expounding that argument, saying people like him do not comfortably fit into the paradigm of either the cultural Right or the economic Left.
“I am myself an example of this, because I was a supporter of the Swatantra Party in my student days, because of its free-market economic views and social liberalism, then after its demise found no vehicle for my own ideas and remained outside the party system until the post-liberalisation period created a Congress very different from the statist Congress that I had opposed in the 1970s and early 1980s,” Tharoor wrote.
A more elaborate description of Tharoor’s dislike of what he called the “statist Congress” can be found in his 1997 book India: From Midnight to the Millennium.
From Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi to Sonia Gandhi, Tharoor’s critical takes in the book feature nearly every member of the family. On Indira, he wrote, “Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond the expedient campaign slogans…”
He called Sanjay Gandhi Indira’s “thuggish son” in the book.
“A builder’s daughter from Turino, without a college degree, with no experience of Indian life beyond the rarefied realms of the Prime Minister’s residence, fiercely protective of her privacy, so reserved and unsmiling in public that she has been unkindly dubbed ‘the Turin Shroud’ leading a billion Indians at the head of the world’s most complex, rambunctious and violent democracy? This situation, improbable if weren’t true, is proof again of the enduring appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty,” is how he described Sonia in it.
Shashi Tharoor is the only sane man in Congress. He is the only one who can understand the aspirations and dreams of the youth. People, especially the youth of the nation, admire him for his integrity, intellect, civility and humility. He is an asset for the Congress. The high command should have given him more opportunities and groomed him for greater responsibilities.
The “youth leader”, quite unfortunately, has his head in the clouds and could not care less. He sees a challenge to his “kingdom” from Mr. Tharoor.