Let Tharoor tweet for democracy’s sake

Richard III of England lost his kingdom for a horseshoe nail, according to popular legend. Will Shashi Tharoor lose his political career for a mere 140 character tweet? By disagreeing with the government stance on toughening visa norms in a post on the popular website twitter.com, Tharoor has incurred the ire of his boss, Union external affairs minister, SM Krishna.

This is not the first time that Tharoor’s Twitter activity has got him into trouble. Only a few months ago, he was pulled up for making fun of his government’s austerity drive. Of course, many of his fellow Congress party members completely misunderstood what he said, which made his original — if minor — transgression seem much worse than it was.

But Tharoor’s observation on tightening visa norms was neither so “clever-clever” as his earlier one on the travails of travelling “cattle class”. He quite sensibly asked whether toughening the rules would be good for tourism - make India “less welcoming” — and also observed that the “26/11 killers had no visas”. There is, it can hardly be doubted, shades of “locking the stable door after the horse has bolted” in almost all our security measures. So did Tharoor really go too far this time?

On the face of it, the realists might say that Tharoor should have anticipated the reaction. His last controversial tweet became the subject of much hysterical late-night television chatter. Our hungry-for-excitement TV news channels cannot be blamed for seeing a potential Mount Everest every time an earthworm moves. It is the nature of the beast. But if you leave the hysteria out of the equation, at worst Tharoor’s remarks can be the subject of considered debate. Would not that be a minimum requirement of a mature democracy?

Or is it just that traditionalists are unable to understand the new media and the access it gives you to the world? Ministers and party members fight each other all the time. They use their favourite journalists to leak “stories” about their rivals. A running joke in politics is that it is easier to have friends in the opposition than it is in your own party. But Tharoor — who is a career diplomat and not a career politician — has used a medium of these times to put forward his point of view. By doing so, he has also interacted directly with the public.

Tharoor has over 540,000 followers on Twitter. The Congress party needs to take note of number. If democracy runs on popular opinion, then Tharoor at least has popularity. Gagging him will hardly help the cause.

A somewhat unpalatable fact for our politicians to swallow is that democracy is about both dissent and discussion. This dissent could be both within and without their party lines. It might also — gasp, horror — involve members of the public. And Twitter is a quick, easy way of sharing your thoughts with the world.

So what exactly is Tharoor’s crime? That he cannot keep his mouth shut or his fingers from twitching? Neither are cardinal sins. By over-reacting every time Tharoor crosses some invisible party line, the Congress party is behaving like an old-style Stalinist Communist outfit, like Big Brother, like the Ministry of Free Speech which stands for Gag Order.

Instead, the Congress — and other Indian political outfits — should welcome the new world order, where everyone’s opinion counts and everyone is free to air their opinion. This, after all, is what democracy is all about — a free exchange of views. It might well be that politicians find that actual democracy is inimical to their interests — secrecy, intrigue, fascism and organisational supremacy are vital to their self-preservation after all. Sadly, they have no option but to understand these new phenomena.

Like the idiot of old who stood outside the town hall cursing the government, today’s “tweeple” are neither frightened nor ashamed of sharing their views with the world.