Thiruvananthapuram: Congress Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor continues to face attacks from party colleagues for supporting the stance of two other party leaders -- Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh -- that demonising Prime Minister Narendra Modi all the time would not work.
"I have argued for six years now that Narendra Modi should be praised whenever he says or does the right thing, which would add credibility to our criticisms whenever he errs," Tharoor had said.
While on Sunday, Kerala party unit chief Mullapally Ramachandran and Leader of Opposition in Kerala House Ramesh Chennithala criticised him, on Monday K. Muraleedharan, Benny Behanan and TN Prathapan took a potshot at the Thiruvananthapuram MP.
While Muraleedharan said anyone who wished to glorify Modi must join the BJP, Behanan said it was not a Congress MP's job to praise Modi. "The role of a Congress lawmaker is to oppose the BJP policies and not to glorify Modi," said Behanan, who is also the convenor of the Congress-led UDF in Kerala.
Prathapan, in a letter to interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, asked her to rein in leaders who were glorifying Modi.
Reacting to party colleagues' criticism, Tharoor had said on Sunday he stood by his remarks. "It didn't mean he supports Modi," he said.
Tharoor has not always been in the good books of many state party leaders, right from 2009, when as a rank outsider he was fielded by the Congress in the Lok Sabha elections and won by 99,996 votes and has been keeping the seat since then.
Senior Congress leaders in Kerala, barring perhaps A K Antony, are said to be suspicious of Tharoor as they feel that he is shrewdly positioning himself as a pan-India leader deserving of the mantle of the Congress president. Certain state leaders are also miffed that after the massive victory of the Congress in the state Tharoor had used his social media standing to paint himself as the most reliable bulwark against right-wing forces.
The restlessness in the Congress over the new president has now spilled over into strategy.
Tharoor, as is his won't, is not ready to go down without a fight. He was equally combative. "No one needs to teach me how to take on Modi," Tharoor told Manorama News on Sunday. "It was me who had taken on the BJP more than anybody else in Congress. We will lose our credibility if we don't acknowledge the good things that Modi had done," he said.
To his credit, Tharoor had always been against a blanket criticism of Modi. Here is what he famously said during the release of his book 'The Paradoxical Prime Minister'. "My book is not an attempt to say the man was worthless. I have also said many nice things about the man. That was why I had earlier said this book was not an attempt at floccinaucinihilipilification," Tharoor said. (This 27-alphabet noun is one word for the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.)
In yet another best-seller of his, 'Why I am a Hindu', Tharoor had come up with a sucker punch of a charge that had the BJP squirming in anger. Tharoor said the BJP would tear up the Constitution and create a new Hindu Pakistan if it comes to power again.
He virtually spat at the right-wing pantheon. Tharoor wrote that the stalwarts of the Sangh Parivar – Savarkar, Golwalkar and Deendayal Upadhyay – wanted the Indian Constitution discarded.
"They wanted it discarded because it is based on the wrong idea of the nation. The Constitution assumed the nation of India as a territory. Wrong, they said. The nation is a people, they argued. And the people are Hindus. The rest are essentially guests or interlopers. Christians and Muslims they considered bandits and dacoits," Tharoor said.
In 2014, Tharoor won the seat by 15,000 votes and in 2019 by 99,989 votes. He had termed the 2014 vote his toughest election as his wife Sunanda Pushkar had been found dead in a posh Delhi hotel in the January of that year.
(With inputs from PTI)
