Et Tu Tharoor?

A little over a year ago, when best-selling author and senior United Nations diplomat Shashi Tharoor ran for a parliamentary seat in Kerala, he was heralded as the shining model of the New India. NRIs worldwide and educated Indian professionals rallied to his side, enamored by his willingness to sacrifice a flourishing professional career to pry open the stranglehold that illiterate, corrupt and distasteful anghuta chaaps -- “cattle class,” as Tharoor himself famously tweeted -- had over India’s political system.

It came as a rude shock to everyone, therefore, when the urbane, erudite and articulate minister of state for external affairs was forced to resign because of his involvement in a seamy scandal involving the granting to a woman -- described variously as a close friend/girlfriend/fiancé -- of almost $15 million in secret “sweat equity” in a cricket franchise for which Tharoor aggressively lobbied. The tightly-held details of the sweetheart equity were exposed by Indian Premier League Commissioner Lalit Modi, possibly because he was promoting a competing franchise.

But the scandal bubbling around the IPL, welcome as its exposure is, should not distract from Tharoor’s own culpability, even as he seeks to portray himself as a sacrificial victim of India’s byzantine politics, as, for example, in his recent tweet: “Looking forward to thorough inquiry into the IPL. If my resignation leads to real reform, it will be worthwhile. Our cricket should be clean.”

Tharoor professed repeatedly that he was “merely mentoring” a business group in a laudable attempt to lure a cricket franchise to his home state of Kerala. There is, in fact, incontrovertible evidence that he was far more deeply involved in the shady bidding process than he has let on. But far more significantly, for all his protestations over the “besmirching” of his reputation, Tharoor has provided precious few details or credible defense to refute the core allegations surrounding the sweetheart deal granted to his sweetheart, Sunanda Pushkar.

He deflected the widespread perception that Pushkar was fronting for him with platitudes about the sexism involved in implying “that a reputed business professional and entrepreneur with a long track record of business success can, because of her gender, only be seen as a front for someone else.” It simply defies credulity that Pushkar, an undistinguished sales manager at a real estate company in Dubai with no previous sports marketing experience, would have received $15 million in equity in a high flying $330 million cricket franchise for yet unspecified future “marketing” services. Tharoor’s evasive defense is an affront to the millions of professional Indian women who work hard and play by the rules every day.

But even if we were to accept Tharoor’s unconvincing explanation that Pushkar’s equity was unrelated to him, it was, nevertheless, unseemly and unethical for him to use his political position and connections to promote a business venture in which his girlfriend had a substantial stake without publicly disclosing the blatantly obvious conflict of interest. It reeks of the very “hypocrisy and double dealing,” he thundered in his statement in parliament following his resignation, he had entered politics to eliminate.

Instead, Tharoor’s enduring legacy may well be scaling up the corruption standards of the “cattle class” from their preferred satchels packed with a measly few lakh rupees to the Goldman Sachs stratosphere, in which tens of million of dollars are masked through opaque front companies, proxies and convoluted financial instruments that are hard to trace and even harder to capture on hidden cameras, which have upended the careers of many anghuta chaap Indian politicians in recent years.