Thiruvananthapuram: Senior Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor on Thursday criticised the 24-hour nationwide strike, calling it “merely another Kerala Bandh” and terming the shutdown an infringement on citizens’ freedoms.

In a post on X, Tharoor said it was a “lamentable irony” that while the rest of India had “evolved beyond such coercive disruptions”, Kerala continued to be “held hostage by this organised tyranny of the minority over the unorganised majority”.

Reiterating his long-held position, the Congress MP wrote: “My stand has been consistent since I entered politics: I support the right to protest, but not the right to obstruct. No Indian has the constitutional right to impede the free movement of another.”

He argued that militant trade unionism had already driven industry away from the state and warned that continuing with “antediluvian methods of ‘muscle power’” would further damage Kerala’s prospects.

“By clinging to these antediluvian methods of ‘muscle power’ that forcefully confine citizens as prisoners in their own homes, and oblige shopkeepers to down their shutters, we are ensuring our state remains unwelcoming to youth and enterprise,” he said.

Tharoor maintained that the right to strike did not extend to enforcing a shutdown on others. “To paralyse a state, disrupting daily life, commerce, and movement, is an assault on the liberty of the common citizen,” he said, adding that protest should remain a “moral statement, not a physical blockade”.

The MP further said Kerala could not aspire to be a modern, investor-friendly destination while adhering to “outdated forms of agitation that the rest of the world — and indeed, the rest of India — has discarded”. “Let us respect the right to dissent, but let us also fiercely defend the right to disagree and the freedom to work and travel,” he added.