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The Congress on Monday sacked party MP in the Lok Sabha Shashi Tharoor from the list of party spokespersons. A disciplinary committee of the party punished Tharoor on a complaint by its Kerala unit, which had objected to the former minister’s “praise” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Tharoor, in a statement, said he accepted the party decision but would have welcomed an opportunity to respond to the complaint by the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC). On the reports that the Kerala unit was compiling a report against him, Tharoor had tweeted last week that it would mean the state leadership would finally read what he actually wrote instead of oral summaries.
The punishment to Tharoor might seem harsh. He has been having an uneasy relationship with the Congress' state leadership ever since joining the Congress in 2009.
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In the last general election, Tharoor had a tough time against BJP candidate O Rajagopal in the Thiruvananthapuram seat. The BJP had significantly increased its vote share in the state and Rajagopal had come close to winning the seat.
Party spokesperson Sobha Oza claimed the action on Tharoor had nothing to with the ongoing controversy over the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar. She had died under mysterious circumstances at a five star hotel in New Delhi in January this year.
Last week, revelation of a postmortem report revived suspicion that Pushkar’s was an unnatural death, and that she might have been poisoned. The Delhi Police, however, has claimed the report is based on inconclusive evidence.
Tharoor, one of his party’s most articulate spokespersons, in a statement said he accepted the party’s decision but also that he wasn’t offered an opportunity to explain his position. “While I haven’t yet seen the KPCC complaint referred to, and while I would have welcomed an opportunity to respond to it and draw the attention of the AICC leadership to the full range of my statements and writings on contemporary political issues, I am now treating this matter as closed and have no further comment to make,” Tharoor said. The report of the Kerala unit had claimed Tharoor, by his praise of Modi, hurt the sentiments of Congress workers who had sincerely and tirelessly worked to ensure his victory in the Lok Sabha elections.
The KPCC complaint against Tharoor came in the wake of Prime Minister Modi naming him as one of nine ambassadors he had chosen for the Swachh Bharat or Clean India campaign. His detractors also questioned the Congress MP’s presence in the United States that coincided with that of Modi’s and had appeared on various television channels. Party sources say nobody was assigned from the Congress to the US during Modi's visit and speak on the party's behalf. A Congress mouthpiece in Kerala, Veekshanam, had in an editorial questioned his loyalty to the party.
Tharoor has not been briefing media at the AICC headquarters from June 4 after his piece in the Huffington Post praising Modi kicked up a big row in the Congress. The Congress leader had said it would be \"churlish\" if his party did not take note of Modi's efforts to sound gracious and accommodative and reinvent himself from a \"hate figure into an avatar of modernity and progress\". The Congress had snubbed him immediately, describing it as his \"personal view\". Since then Tharoor did not brief the media from AICC podium. Incidentally, Tharoor's press conferences at the AICC are not uploaded on the party website beyond May 7 this year, while the site is updated on AICC briefings till October 10.
The three-member disciplinary action committee of AICC, which looked into the complaint of its Kerala unit, comprised Motilal Vora, A K Antony and Sushilkumar Shinde. A senior party functionary said despite the fact that Tharoor's books in past had been \"very critical\" of late Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, the party made him a minister even when he was the first time MP. Tharoor was made the national spokesperson in January, within days of wife’s suspicious death.
Tharoor had earlier said he was being targeted by the state unit for being an “outsider”. \"It is painful to hear suggestions that I would relinquish the ideals of Congress and join the BJP for power or personal gain. I have always appreciated good words or deeds in others even if they are in the opposite camp – and I have, with equal strength, criticised them when they are in the wrong,” he had said.
AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh had supported Tharoor accepting Modi's invite for \"Swachch Bharat\" mission. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson termed the action against Tharoor as an internal matter of that party but also evidence of “intolerance” in the Congress.
