Mukul Kesavan - In his image: The importance of being Shashi
There is something of the spurned lover about the BJP troll army's attitude towards Tharoor
Arnab Goswami's
fascination with Shashi Tharoor has survived his transition from Times Now to
Republic TV. In itself this obsession is curious but unimportant, but as a
symptom of a broader sangh parivar condition and as an
illustration of the Hindutvavadi view of the world, it repays examination.
It isn't surprising
that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its fellow travellers dislike Tharoor. He
seems to be a living, breathing incarnation of everything that makes them
uneasy. He's a Nehru-lover (he's written a biography of India's first prime
minister), he is ostentatiously secular and flamboyantly anglophone. His social
media response to Republic TV's insinuations went viral as an example of 'too
much ingliss'.
This is what Tharoor
tweeted: "Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations &
outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a
journalist." The really worrying thing about this sentence isn't the big
words in it but the fact that it's easy to imagine Tharoor saying it out loud
and getting to the full stop without faltering. No one has spoken English like
this since Curzon died. 'Farrago' briefly
became the most searched for word in India afterwards. That's the other thing
that irks the cadre and online choruses of the brotherhood. For a deracinated
elitist Tharoor has a large and devoted online following, some five and a half
million followers on Twitter. People seem interested in his doings, not least bhakts.
This is because there
is an old-fashioned way in which Shashi Tharoor embodies middle class success
in India. Before liberalization, the salariat's ambitions centred on the civil
service examinations. Tharoor went one better. He topped his university
examinations as a high-achieving desi should, earned a PhD in
a foreign university in short order, immediately joined an international civil
service, the UN, and very nearly rose to the top. In the idiom of Indian
educational credentials, he is 'Secretary General (Fail)'. It doesn't matter
that he didn't make it; it's enough that he had a shot at the top job. It didn't stop there.
After leaving the UN, Tharoor embarked upon a political career. The highlights
of this career aren't the official positions he has achieved - Tharoor is
unlikely to see a junior ministership in the HRD ministry as a political summit
- but the elections that he won. One reason why the sangh parivar's
trolls, both online and on television, take Tharoor seriously is because he is
a Lok Sabha MP twice over.
Both in good times and
in bad, both when the Congress won and when it lost, Tharoor was sent to
Parliament by Thiruvananthapuram's electorate. Unlike other English-speaking
types who became parliamentarians through the Rajya Sabha route, Tharoor won
proper elections. I have CPI(M) friends who are still traumatized by his
victories: how, they ask incredulously, could a carpetbagger with barely any
Malayalam win Thiruvananthapuram twice? Tharoor once said that
when he began his political career he was approached by the Congress, the
Communists and the BJP. He chose the Congress because he felt ideologically
comfortable with it. But it isn't hard to see why the BJP was interested. To
recruit this cosmopolitan civil servant plus writer plus Nehruvian to the BJP
would have been something of a coup… read more:
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