The response to an RTI query seems to disprove his contention that he had nothing to do with a Rs3.27-lakh purchase of books authored by him by the foreign ministry when he was junior minister.
Shashi Tharoor has been caught on the wrong foot once again.
The response to an RTI query seems to disprove his contention that he had nothing to do with a Rs3.27-lakh purchase of books authored by him by the foreign ministry when he was junior minister. However, the response doesn’t strongly imply that Tharoor was necessarily aware of the decision.
On January 16, Tharoor went to town on Twitter blasting a media report which said he had misused his ministerial clout in making his ministry purchase his books for Indian missions abroad. “Truth is irrelevant 4th (for the) bash ST (Shashi Tharoor) brigade,” Tharoor wrote.
He said he had told “the journalist that my books had been bought by MEA years before I had anything to do with government, no idea they had again last year.
“It’s contemptible that despite this, they wld (would) imply I orchestrated a decision I was not even aware of.”
The books are The Great Indian Novel, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, and the coffee table book India in collaboration with photographer Ferrante Ferranti — all published by Penguin — 150 copies each of which were purchased by the ministry.
In the tweet, Tharoor also wrote: “Just for the record, my staff & I have nothing to do with MEA book purchases & I was completely unaware of mine being amongst those bought.”
The matter was treated as closed after Tharoor’s rebuttal.
But activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal has received documents (in response to his RTI query) by the ministry’s publicity officer KG Kaushik which show that the ministry placed the order for the books on September 29, 2009, four months after Tharoor’s swearing-in.
The media report against which Tharoor tweeted said: “While Tharoor may be technically right that he was not involved in the selection process, propriety demanded that he should have advised the ministry not to purchase his own books lest it be misconstrued.”
Has RTI nailed another lie?
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