The former diplomat, writer and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has featured in a Deutsche Welle TV interview with Tim Sebastian, the bulldog who hosted Hard Talk on BBC.
After facing a barrage of questions on the Congress party’s woes, past and present, Sebastian poses the question that will please those looking forward to a “Congress-mukt Bharat”.
Tharoor’s response, calm, cool and collected, is illuminating in the context of what is going on currently in the country under the aegis of the Narendra Modi government.
Do you still think your party deserves to survive, given all the human rights abuses, and the corruption scandals?
It’s like saying if someone deserves to survive because he has got a wart on his face or a pimple on his nose.
It’s a bit more than that.
No, it’s not a bit more than that. There are far more important things the Congress party stands for.
It stands for the pluralist identity of India. It stands for the values of the freedom struggle. It stands for social justice in a country where 70 per cent of the people live on two dollars a day. It stands for the distribution of the profits of government while also standing for growth that has enabled India to become the third largest economy in the world, all of which are important things to be proud of.
The Congress party inherited from the British an India with 90 per cent of the population living under the poverty line, today it is 26%. It inherited an India with 17% literacy; today it is 72%. It inherited an India with life expectancy of 27, today that is 70.
Some progress has been made and the Congress party ruled India for much of the time when progress was being made. Let us not write all that off.
View the full interview here: Shashi Tharoor in Conflict Zone
An exaggerated sense of one’s own importance is pervasive in the dying party. We might also wonder just how many thousands of relatively young people have joined the party in recent times.
The only reason we even think of this party, founded by well-meaning British expatriates, nurtured by Gandhi and the early Nehru and hijacked by his family, is our longing for a party that can stand up to the might of the BJP and help democracy survive. Such lofty commitments cannot even be imagined by the doddering oligarchs in the party who want to wield power in the name of a dynastic offspring who is yet to prove that he knows what he is about. I am very pleased to read that people attend his rallies so that they can walk away the khursis and charpoys even before completes his ill-strung speeches, the exaggeration implicit in the reports notwithstanding.
Wait for Tharoor to jump ship.
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India needs congress, for the good things it did in the past…if congress leaders stop Hindu bashing, glorification of people like umar Khalid..they can stage a comeback..
bjp going ahead bulldozing regional languages and shoving Hindi into throats of Indians is dangerous for the country.
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