Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh talked about polls in the context of the cabinet reshuffle, what appears to be early preparations for that election are under way in distant Thiruvanathapuram.
The formal launch tomorrow of Mattering to India: The Shashi Tharoor Campaign, a book by T.P. Sreenivasan, a former Indian ambassador, has all the trappings of a re-election effort by Tharoor who won the Thiruvanathapuram Lok Sabha seat convincingly by a margin of over 100,000 votes in 2009.
Sreenivasan was Tharoor’s informal shield against attacks on his record on foreign policy during the election campaign and a mobiliser of Malayali intellectuals in support of the Congress candidate’s political debut in Thiruvanathapuram.
The launch will see a coalescing of disparate elements both within the Congress party in Kerala and the state’s larger political class around Tharoor once again, the same coalition that made his election to Parliament two years ago possible.
Vayalar Ravi, the minister for overseas Indian affairs and civil aviation, will receive the book from Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy while M.A. Baby, the former CPM minister for education and culture in the Left Front government that was voted out of power in the state this year, will speak about the book. Ramesh Chennithala, president of the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, will preside over the launch.
A similar function is planned for New Delhi next month at which defence minister A.K. Antony is expected to receive the book.
If the launch of Mattering to India, detailing and analysing what the author calls Tharoor’s “unusual election” campaign in Thiruvanathapuram is, indeed, preparatory to his campaign for re-election so long before it is due, it would be unusual by Indian standards.
But that would be typical of American political campaigns which Tharoor is familiar with and whose styles he significantly incorporated in starting his political career two years ago.
In the US, elections constitute a continuous cycle in life: campaigns for electing a new American President basically begin within a year of the preceding presidential poll and politicians further down the hierarchy get ready for their campaigns several years before they formally announce a run for office.
Sreenivasan’s fascinating account of Tharoor’s campaign for the Lok Sabha, in fact, makes the point that the Congress MP from Thiruvanathapuram may have been plotting a career in Indian politics even when he was a PhD student at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
“A review of Tharoor’s writings, beginning with his doctoral thesis on Indian foreign policy, submitted to the Fletcher School, to his novels, like the monumental The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, Riot will reveal that he deliberately stayed close to Indian history and Indian landscapes as though he was preparing for a political career in India,” Sreenivasan has concluded.
That view is reinforced by a leading Malayalam novelist, K.R. Meera, who argues that Tharoor’s novel, Riot, anticipates his own foray into public life.
Sreenivasan quotes Meera as writing in a Malayalam weekly during Tharoor’s Lok Sabha campaign: “Writers have a sixth sense that birds and animals have… Like previous life, future life too will come before them like a dream.”
Addressing Tharoor in her article, Meera asks: “How did your sixth sense predict the future seven years in advance?”
Sreenivasan points out that in another Tharoor novel, Show Business, the protagonist is eerily created in the author’s own image, “a successful professional from an elite background, who enters politics without quite knowing what he was getting into, tries to conduct himself in politics as if he was still in his former profession, gets embroiled unwittingly in a financial scandal… comes a cropper and resigns”.
What remains to be seen is whether Tharoor’s future will be different from that of his central character. “His hero quit in disgust, while he himself stayed on to battle it out.” So far!
What lends credence to the belief that tomorrow’s book launch is preparatory to Tharoor’s re-election bid was his calculated absence from New Delhi during the past one week when even politicians who had no hope of being part of the cabinet reshuffle were in the capital, networking. Tharoor’s priority now clearly appears to be Thiruvanathapuram.
Sreenivasan recalls that Baby, the CPM leader, had coined a quip at a function addressed by Tharoor in Kerala soon after he quit the United Nations following his failed bid to be its secretary-general.
“The US had to field someone to ‘ban’ the ‘moon’ from rising at the UN firmament,” a reference to Ban Ki-moon, the victorious South Korean candidate in the race for the secretary-general’s job. “The literal meaning of ‘Shashi’, he (Baby) recalled, was the ‘moon’.”
Notwithstanding Sreenivasan’s categorical disavowal, the book may revive speculation about “the secret behind Tharoor’s popularity with Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh”. That “they owed something to Tharoor on account of an important service rendered during his days with Kofi Annan”, the former UN secretary-general.
“It was feared at one time that the Volcker report on the Iraqi oil-for-food scam, which led to the resignation of the then minister for external affairs, K Natwar Singh, might have enmeshed the Congress party itself. The theory was that Tharoor was instrumental is ensuring that the Congress Party was let off the hook,” Sreenivasan recalls. But he adds that this theory was far-fetched.
“I heard from an authoritative source that the person who rescued the Congress Party and others was not Tharoor, but another former senior UN official from India. Subsequently he felt betrayed and threatened to come out with the details, but was apparently mollified,” Sreenivasan reveals in the book.
Name of Source: Telegraph