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ShareWhatever his detractors may say about him today, there is a strongly intellectual side to Shashi Tharoor. You don't get to be a PhD in your early 20s or join the United Nations or indeed become a minister of state for external affairs if you are short on grey cells. Tharoor straddles the literary, diplomatic, cultural and glamour worlds with practised ease, hobnobbing with the world's power set and the beau monde while finding the time to dash off several books. Not to forget his boyish good looks and his cut glass accent. No wonder he is the darling of the Mumbai social scene which fetes him every time he flits by.
He is also the kind of person the Congress loves, or ought to love. Highly educated, articulate, modern, international and with a yen for public service. The Indian government was ready to throw its weight behind him for the post of the UN secretary general and when that did not work out, he was offered a ticket and given a prestigious ministerial portfolio after he won the elections handsomely. A charmed existence, surely. Then why is the Congress now baying for his blood? How did a rising star drop down to earth so fast?
Because Tharoor the intellectual has another side to him, which has a habit of showing up at the wrong moments and Tharoor the high-minded turns into Tharoor the Wodehouse character, a frivolous member of the Drones Club, an overgrown public schoolboy who revels in silly quips. His felicity for the English language allows him to indulge in puns, the kind which would draw hoots of laughter in a club (or a college canteen) among the smart PLU (people like us) set over a snifter and a cigar. The jokes come flying thick and fast and like cigar smoke vanish into thin air never to be heard again. Tharoor and his peers are comfortable inhabiting both worlds, the serious and the flippant, with equal ease.
Disaster strikes when both worlds collide, as they did when Tharoor channelled Bertie Wooster through his message on Twitter. He made a joke, not about something irrelevant but about his worklife. The media, perpetually in silly season, picked it up and Jayanthi Natarajan, otherwise a lady with a sense of humour, put on her best outraged matron act and huffed and puffed with righteous indignation on television. Since then other Congress worthies have put Tharoor on the rack for his unpardonable sin.
And what sin is that? By saying, in response to a query about travelling by economy class on flights, that he would definitely fly, "in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows", Tharoor had, by implication, made fun of government and party policy and perhaps even of the first family. Shock horror! "Cattle class" is a common enough phrase among English speakers and sounds oh-so-cute when said by those who normally travel only by First and the holy cow reference works as a pun. One can imagine everyone hooting with laughter over the evening single malt.
Alas, Tharoor, what is good at the Drones Club is not so appropriate in a political party. By becoming a party worker and then a minister, Tharoor is no longer a private figure. Every action and statement is in the public domain. This was no off-the-record line picked up by an inconvenient microphone; this was deliberately put out. Much as Tharoor and his apologists may complain about the Congress and the government lacking a sense of humour, making fun of a prescribed policy amounts to indiscipline. Remember also that this indiscretion came on top of the rebuke he faced for living in five-star digs rather than in government accommodation. In short, he hadalready picked up a reputation of being lightweight and out of tune with Congress culture.
There are other factors of course, like good old-fashioned envy. Several resented his smooth entry into Parliament and the government. He came back to India once his foreign options dried up and hit the ground running, getting a prestigious Congress ticket above many older party workers. Then he marched into a key ministry. The ways of the Delhi darbar being what they are, the knives were out and when the opportunity came, the blades were twisted lethally.
It will be a pity if he loses his job for this silly infraction. It is his work that should matter and so far there is no indication that he has failed. Plus the prime minister himself has dismissed the whole thing as a joke. But Tharoor needs to help himself here too. He needs to keep his inner Bertie Wooster under control; the next time it won't be all taken as a silly, inconsequential joke.
