Tharoor’s articulate defence of Modi regime abroad deepens fault lines within Congress

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s eloquent and erudite defence of Operation Sindoor and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s doctrine for future engagements with Pakistan may be earning him a new fan base in the BJP ecosystem but it is also steadily widening the gulf between him and his party leadership.

Also read | Time had come to hit Pakistan hard and smart, that's what India did: Tharoor

Sources in the Congress say Tharoor’s latest utterances during an interaction with the Indian diaspora in Panama has, yet again, left his party leadership in Delhi red-faced.

India’s response

Addressing a meeting with the Indian diaspora in Panama, the diplomat-turned-politician said, “What has changed in recent years is that the terrorists have also realised they will have a price to pay… For the first time, India breached the LoC (Line of Control) between India and Pakistan to conduct a surgical strike on a terror base (after) the Uri strike in September 2016. That was something we had not done before... after the January 2019 Pulwama terror attack... we not only crossed the LoC, we also crossed the international border and struck a terrorist headquarters. This time (in Operation Sindoor), we went beyond both of those; we struck in the Punjabi heartland of Pakistan.”

The Thiruvananthapuram MP is currently leading an all-party delegation abroad to deliver Modi’s message against Pakistan-sponsored terror and India’s response to it. After departing from India on May 23 and following a brief stop in the United States of America, the Tharoor-led delegation visited Guyana as part of the global outreach mission. It is presently in Panama.

The delegation, which also includes LJP (RV) MP Shambhavi Chaudhary, JMM MP Sarfaraz Ahmad, TDP MP GM Harish Balayogi, BJP MPs Shashank Mani Tripathi, Tejasvi Surya and Bhubaneswar Kalita, Shiv Sena MP Milind Deora and former ambassador Taranjit Singh Sandhu, will also be visiting Brazil and Colombia before returning to the US for another round of talks.

Not party's choice

Tharoor, it may be recalled, was not the Congress leadership’s choice to represent the party on the delegations. That the Modi government had directly reached out to him with the offer to lead one of the seven such missions had triggered a storm within the Congress, even more so after names recommended by Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi were rejected (except that of former Union minister Anand Sharma) by the Centre. The Congress had made its peace with the Centre’s wily move and was beginning to accept that as leader of a government delegation, Tharoor would need to canvas the diplomatic narrative of the Modi regime.

Tharoor’s Panama statement has, however, created fresh fault lines in the party. The Congress leadership believes it “is a deliberate misrepresentation of facts to strengthen the BJP’s narrative about earlier Congress-led regimes not acting decisively against Pakistan and the terror it exports to India,” a senior Congress leader told The Federal.

‘Super spokesperson’

Hitting out at Tharoor through X, Congress leader and former MP Udit Raj wondered if Modi should declare him “super spokesperson” of the BJP or even declare him as India’s new foreign minister before his return to India.

Also read | Tharoor targeted at Rahul's behest for keeping national interest above party: BJP

“How could you denigrate the golden history of Congress by saying that before PM Modi, India never crossed the LoC and the International Border? In 1965, the Indian Army entered Pakistan at multiple points, which completely surprised the Pakistanis in the Lahore sector. In 1971, India tore Pakistan in two pieces and during the UPA government, several surgical strikes were unleashed but drum beating was not done to encash politically. How could you be so dishonest to the party which gave you so much,” Raj wrote further.

The biting tirade from Raj could have been dismissed as an isolated reaction of an angry Congress office bearer since the former MP had taken similar potshots at Tharoor earlier too.

Top brass miffed

However, signs that the party leadership had taken a grim view of Tharoor’s Panama statement came on Wednesday (May 28) evening with Congress’s media wing chief Pawan Khera tagging Tharoor in a series of posts on X that shared news reports and historical vignettes which rebut the claim that India’s surgical strikes on Pakistan began only after Modi became Prime Minister.

Among the posts put out by Khera was a news clip from May 2019 that quoted the late Dr Manmohan Singh’s interview with a national daily in which the former Prime Minister asserted, “Let me remind you that our armed forces were always given a free hand to operationally respond to every threat. Multiple surgical strikes took place during our tenure (UPA government, 2004 to 2014) too... In the past 70 years, a government in power never had to hide behind the valour of our Armed Forces. Such attempts to politicise our forces are shameful and unacceptable.”

The news clip also referred to details of six surgical strikes that were conducted between 2008 and 2014 in Pakistan’s Bhattal, Neelum, Sharda, Sawan and Nazapir sectors as well as those conducted during the Atal Behari Vajpayee-led NDA government between 2000 and 2003 in the Nadala and Baroh sectors.

‘Gone beyond the brief’

Khera also shared the link to a 2016 report by news agency PTI, which quoted then foreign secretary (and current external affairs minister) S Jaishankar as purportedly telling the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs that “professionally done, target-specific, limited-calibre counter-terrorist operations have been carried out across the LoC in the past too, but this is for the first time that the government has made it public.”

The Congress’s communications chief Jairam Ramesh shared Khera’s post as also the posts by Raj, making it clear that the party leadership had decided to not let Tharoor’s statement go unchallenged.

Also read | Op Sindoor: Tharoor praises Modi; Congress leader calls him BJP's 'super spokesperson'

“He has gone beyond the brief of the delegation and made a statement that directly contradicts not just the stand of the party but also statements made to the press by former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. This is unacceptable. While we understand and appreciate that as head of the delegation Tharoor has to put forward the government’s narrative against Pakistan, what he has done in Panama goes beyond that brief; he is peddling the propaganda that the prime minister and the BJP regularly dish out to domestic audiences to belittle the Congress,” a senior Congress functionary told The Federal.

Political statements

Another party leader pointed out that besides Tharoor, there are four other Congress leaders – former Union ministers Salman Khurshid and Anand Sharma and incumbent MPs Manish Tewari and Amar Singh – who are part of the all-party delegations sent to different clusters of nations and that barring Sharma, who had been recommended by Rahul Gandhi, all others were handpicked by the government.

“All other party leaders who have gone on these delegations are sticking to the assigned diplomatic brief that India will defend its sovereignty at any cost and will respond strongly and unitedly to acts of terror by Pakistan; even Opposition leaders like Kanimozhi and Supriya Sule who, like Tharoor, are heading delegations, are speaking on the same lines but Tharoor is making political statements that are not pushing India’s stand but the BJP’s viewpoint,” this party leader said.

Sources said the Congress leadership is convinced that Tharoor’s Panama statement will be “politically and electorally weaponised” by the BJP. “The BJP will use this definitely; its social media army is already circulating Tharoor’s video to claim that Congress was soft on Pakistan; Modi and his leaders will go around quoting Tharoor and saying even Congress leaders agree that only Modi had the courage to teach Pakistan a lesson,” a Congress MP whose name had been recommended by Gandhi for the delegations but was rejected by the Centre told The Federal.

Treading with caution

For now, despite its growing consternation with Tharoor’s salvos, the Congress has no option other than issuing rebuttals. Sources concede the party can’t act against the Thiruvananthapuram MP while he is still on an official visit abroad and that “even acting against him immediately upon his return may be difficult because it would make him a martyr and allow the BJP to go to town accusing us of acting against an MP who spoke strongly in India’s interest abroad”.

Also read | Tharoor on leading Operation Sindoor delegation: No politics, it's national service

Yet, an influential section of party leaders share the view that Tharoor’s transgressions cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. “We will, of course, have to decide carefully how to act. It has been obvious for some time now that he (Tharoor) is exploring a future outside Congress even if he has repeatedly dismissed these reports but his statements leave no doubt. The question is what do we do and how? One option is that once the delegations return, we take some form of disciplinary action, may be serve him a show-cause notice and ask for an explanation for the comments he has made but knowing him, he will wriggle out of that with a cleverly worded response. The other option is he returns and we wait for him to breach the party line again, which he is bound to do given his recent stand on many issues, and when that happens we give him no quarter. What is clear is that we cannot allow him to go around undermining the party and humiliating our leadership this way,” a Congress office-bearer close to Rahul Gandhi told The Federal.