Sidelining Tharoor: The Congress is going overboard by silencing him

While the Congress has linked the dismissal of Shashi Tharoor as party spokesperson to his involvement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Clean India campaign, the party also claims that it has nothing to do with the controversy surrounding his wife Sunanda Pushkar’s death, which incidentally erupted around the same time. [caption id=“attachment_1755137” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Congress leader Shashi Tharoor. AFP[/caption] The recent appreciation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan by Tharoor was the opportunity which the party used to quickly sideline the Thiruvananthapuram MP, who is also embroiled in controversy over the medical report about his wife’s death. However, the Congress took great pains to show that Tharoor’s removal had nothing to do with Pushkar’s death. “If people in the Congress are upset, the action on Tharoor is certainly justified. But let me add we can’t have a media trial or by a kangaroo court on Tharoor regarding Sunanda’s death. The Congress still stands by Tharoor on the unfortunate death of Sunanda,” Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha during a debate on Times Now. However, this isn’t even the first time that Tharoor praised Modi. Although eyebrows were raised when the Thiruvananthapuram MP praised the Clean India Mission, the Congress high command did not take the matter seriously until the AIIMS report on his ex-wife’s death came out. It was quite obvious that the high command worked in great alacrity and in tandem with its Kerala unit to act on Tharoor. Tharoor had earlier authored an article titled How Narendra Modi May Have Evolved into ‘Modi 2.0’ for The Huffington Post in which he had lavished praise on the prime minister. There were definitely murmurs of protest in the Congress but they soon died down and Tharoor carried on as a party spokesperson. “Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was a government function and not a BJP private function. Appreciating a government programme cannot be a crime. The punishment is too harsh when we look at the crime,” BJP leader Subramanian Swamy said, unwilling to buy the Congress reasoning for sacking Tharoor as party spokesperson unceremoniously. He pointed out that the Congress was adopting different yardsticks in the treatment meted out to different leaders. Swamy pointed out that senior leader Digvijaya Singh was spared the stick when he recently in an op-ed in The Hindu, History, battleground for politics “implicitly” praised the prime minister. “There are other reasons for the removal of Tharoor as a party spokesperson. There is the IPL factor as well because a lot of Congress leaders will get into the dock if things come out in the open. There should be a SIT enquiry into the whole matter,” Swamy said.