Tharoor wins verbal battle, but Modi prevails in political war

If the thrust and parry of political rhetoric were a schoolboy’s debate, then merely on the strength of his verbal flourish, Shashi Tharoor may be said to have won his exchange with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday. In response to Modi’s taunt about a “Rs 50 crore girlfriend”, Tharoor responded to say that he considered his wife “priceless”, but suggested that only a man capable of the Grand Passion would understand that. As political zingers go, it may have been pretty effective. And since even those who are not ill-disposed towards Modi have conceded that his turn of phrase in this instance - the reference to a “Rs 50 crore girlfriend” - was ill-chosen and insensitive to gender sensibilities, Modi appears, for the moment, to have yielded ground on this one. But Tharoor’s efforts to milk this rhetorical victory for more may yet recoil on him. “It is not gentlemanly,” he said on Tuesday, “to talk about someone’s personal life.” That’s true in a general sense, of course, but Tharoor’s personal life is being talked about today only because it intruded into the political-business domain in a manner that suggested that the woman to whom he was affianced in 2010 was the beneficiary of a ‘sweetheart deal’ in an IPL franchise venture to which he had lent his backing and, let’s not forget, his political influence. [caption id=“attachment_506964” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  Modi may have lost the verbal battle, but not the political war AFP[/caption] It was Tharoor’s failure then to keep his personal life and his politics in separate, hermetically sealed compartments - in the manner that, one feels sure, even he would like anyone in public life to do - that created the circumstances that compelled him to resign.  It also gave his party president Sonia Gandhi grounds to crow in front of the media ( as she did here) that unlike the BJP, the Congress was proactive about asking those in its ranks who even faced the faintest taint of corruption - such as Shashi Tharoor - to resign. It’s true, of course, that the harsh light of unkind publicity caused Sunanda Pushkar to renounce her ‘‘sweat equity" rights in the IPL Kochi franchise that had come in for public scrutiny owing to her relationship with Tharoor. To that extent, yes, the ‘sweetheart deal’ was spiked. But far harder would it be to spike the suggestion that Tharoor, for all the suavity and unctuous charm that he oozes, put himself in a conflict-of-interest situation that compromised him politically. That says something about his flawed judgement, and is fair game to invoke on the political platform when he is readmitted to the Ministry today. Which is the point that will linger long after the news cycle of the day has run its he-said-she-said course. So, Tharoor may have won the ‘battle of the zingers’, but faces the mortification of having old errors of political judgement dragged back into the public domain. To be fair, though, the Rs 50 crore ‘sweetheart deal’ that collapsed will probably not cause him as much embarrassment today, particularly in a Congress where Sonia Gandhi’s son-in -law Robert Vadra stands exposed as the undue beneficiary of far more brazen ‘sweetheart deals’ from land developers that grew his fortune some 600-fold in three years. Modi’s ill-chosen turn of phrase has given rise to media analyses about whether his public utterances disqualify him from holding higher office.  Even columnist Swapan Dasgupta, who is politically inclined towards the BJP, concedes that Modi’s platform speeches, rough-edged as they are, may work well in Gujarati, but lose some of their idiomatic relevance and cultural resonance in other languages. To that extent, he argues, Modi may have to be mindful in the future about how best to retain his edgy rhetoric, which stirs up the hardcore BJP cadre, without causing disquiet to middle-of-the-road constituencies. But the point, as Dasgupta makes, is that Modi is seen to be “divisive” or “polarising” merely because he challenges some of the comfortable assumptions on which political life and social life in India are based. One of those assumptions, which Congress spokesperson Digvijaya Singh articulated recently, was an abidance by a political protocol in which mainstream parties would avoid any allusion to the ‘sweetheart deals’ and other business interests from which family members of leading politicians may have benefited. It is this ‘conspiracy of silence’ across political parties that inhibited a detailed investigation of Robert Vadra’s land deals even after some tantalising details made it to the public domain last year. And even BJP president Nitin Gadkari’s shadowy business dealings were off the radar - until Arvind Kejriwal shattered the silence. Today, the floodgates have opened, and more and more details of these and other ‘sweetheart deals’ are tumbling out. Subramanian Swamy has promised yet more details on Rahul Gandhi’s and Sonia Gandhi’s own business dealings that fell foul of Company Law provisions. No longer is it possible to claim innocently, as Tharoor does, that to drag one’s personal life into the public domain is “ungentlemanly”. Modi may have got his timbre wrong in this instance, but his larger point - that the family ties of leading politicians are not above political scrutiny, particularly when they appear to profit from the relationship - is the argument that resonates with anyone who looks beyond the tone to the substance of his rhetoric.