New Delhi: Amid deteriorating ties with his party, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Monday termed “thoughtful” an analysis by an X user who posted a long thread on the social media platform about the contrast between the veteran leader and Rahul Gandhi.
The X user said the contrast between Tharoor and former Congress chief Gandhi reflects two ideological tendencies that have existed within the party.
“The problem is not their coexistence. The problem is Congress’s inability to choose, integrate, or execute either coherently,” the X user said in the thread.
The X user goes by the “Civitas Sameer” handle and not much is known about the person.
Responding to the X user’s remarks, Tharoor said, “Thank you (for) this thoughtful analysis. There has always been more than one tendency in the party; your framing is fair, and reflective of a certain perception of the current reality.”
The X user had also said in the post that Tharoor broadly aligns with a 1990s-era Congress tendency that is urban-facing, institutionally-oriented and reform-compatible.
“This orientation emerged during economic transition and elite-led governance, not as virtue, but as a historical circumstance,” the post read.
Tharoor has not engaged in a “rightward shift” as many on the Congress side make it out to be, the X user said.
“He was a proud Hindu from day one for his own reasons (whatever it may be) and even wrote a whole book about it called ‘Why I am a Hindu’,” the post read.
“Many on the Right are merely noticing it now because of the reactive ostracisation efforts of the mainstream INC (Indian National Congress). Like the urban technocratic leaders of the past, he is being sidelined by this new INC,” it added.
However, the post is not an endorsement of Tharoor’s world view, the X user said, adding that it is an observation that he understands limits, while the Congress, as a party, does not.
The Congress today is neither a credible urban reformist party nor a serious rural mass party, the post read.
“As a result, its identity is now primarily oppositional, not aspirational. For a national party, this is fatal. Opposition without a governing philosophy is political decay. The identity of the INC today has become ‘opposition’,” the X user claimed.
On Saturday, while lauding the Congress-led United Democratic Front’s (UDF) win in the Kerala local bodies polls, Tharoor also congratulated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its historic performance in his Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency, calling it the “beauty of democracy”.
The ties between Tharoor and the Congress have been strained for some time now, with the former diplomat’s remarks often being at variance with the party line and the party distancing itself from his comments.
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