Wages Of Arrogance

I don’t believe the Gods wished to destroy Shashi Tharoor, but I am convinced that he tempted Fate once too often.

The Gods, on evidence, have been more than kind to him. How many Indians of his generation are born in London, read children’s classics as lullabies when in diapers, and educated at the best institutions in India and abroad? And how many are blessed with an intellect and eloquence that saw him leapfrog the United Nations hierarchy to take a close shot at the Secretary General’s post?

Only time will tell if the latest blip in Tharoor’s otherwise charmed life has a terminal effect on his new-found political career. It is perhaps a measure of the faith reposed by the Congress Party high command in their light-eyed boy, and of the boy’s own abundant fund of goodwill and good fortune, that Tharoor’s several earlier faux-pas (see sidebar) were glossed over and the junior minister was allowed to continue untethered. In hindsight though, their combined effect might have decisively eroded Tharoor’s credibility and rendered him so vulnerable that when the latest Kochi-gate unravelled, he was left hopelessly isolated and alone.

Faced with the latest controversy over his involvement in the gifting of nearly $15 million in sweat equity to his lady friend Sunanda Pushkar in an IPL franchise for which he lobbied strenuously, Tharoor played a variety of cards.

Granted a politician’s private life is nobody else’s business but his own. Granted also that it’s time we adopted more efficient methods of communication. But where Tharoor tripped up was in the politically expedient and selective use of his “otherness.” He deployed the trappings of the democratic west and of its institutions, without imbibing its essential cardinal tenet of probity — namely, public disclosure of private interest. All the more surprising, considering that Kofi Annan, Tharoor’s former boss at the United Nations, was embarrassed by revelations of nepotism in his last days as Secretary General, and World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in Washington, D.C. was forced to resign after he showered the benefits of a pay raise and unscheduled promotion on his girlfriend and staffer Shaha Riza.

Tharoor should know that the entire country has accepted women in four key posts: Meira Kumar as speaker of the Lok Sabha of which Tharoor is a member, Sonia Gandhi as president of Tharoor’s party, Nirupama Menon-Rao as foreign secretary and Tharoor’s former ministry colleague, and India’s President Pratibha Patil, who swore in Tharoor as junior foreign minister and finally accepted his resignation. So what is the subtext here? Tharoor can only be cribbing about one or both of two things: (a) that the above women are not “attractive”, and (b) that they are not “capable.” Either way, the man has some explaining to do.

In an attempt to emphasize his rootedness, Tharoor also played the “Kerala” card. He tried to explain away his unseemly enthusiasm for the Kochi consortium in the IPL bidding with a my-heart-bleeds-for-Kerala refrain that began with media interviews (“I had a legitimate constituency interest to represent and benefit voters, and thus to advance this team’s prospects for the sake of Kerala which is quite like a backwater in cricketing development”) and culminated in a passionate Manoj Kumar-style recitation of a Malayalam couplet during his farewell speech in Parliament. The ongoing scam revelations — of which Tharoor may well be a part — are reason enough for Kerala to ban IPL from its soil. And for Tharoor’s information, India’s top policy-making echelons — even without his presence — are more than proportionately packed with Keralites: apart from Nirupama Menon-Rao, there’s Shiv Shankar Menon and G.V.Pillai.

Tharoor slipped in the “Conspiracy” card in his own oblique style during a media interview (“I don’t think that there is necessarily a widespread desire within the party to silence me or anything like that….I have heard similar charges….There must be some people who have not been well disposed…”), but abandoned it when he found no takers.

He hopes however that his “Probe My Integrity” card will salvage his endangered political career. Because it concerns what is ideally looked upon as a prerequisite for aspiring to public life, and also because Tharoor has dared the world on this very issue, it’s worth a detailed discussion.

To begin with, nothing substantive on the charges has been forthcoming from Tharoor himself, and his farewell speech — of which much was expected — turned out to be high on empty platitudes, and woefully low on specifics. Flashing his well-publicized past record of three decades as a clean international public servant without a whiff of financial irregularity is, by itself, no credible defence against specific charges of impropriety in the IPL scam. Sorry, but the one does not necessarily flow from the other. Is Tharoor invoking some sort of diplomatic immunity here? Or hinting that his curriculm vitae should automatically place him above suspicion?

Also, what do we probe? Not a rupee or a dollar of IPL money would probably show up in any of Tharoor’s bank account— at least not yet. But the ex-minister’s prima facie culpability is all but established by his own admissions which are no less damning because they are circumstantial. He has, for instance, not denied his role as “mentor and advisor” for an odorous deal which, even if kosher in other respects, included an overwhelmingly generous sweat-equity in favor of his girlfriend that flagrantly violated at least three provisions of the Companies Act, 1956. His OSD (Officer on Special Duty) was present and active at the IPL bidding and during the negotiations before and after. That, his calls and sms-es urging the IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi to — among other things — expedite the Kochi deal, plus the latest revelations that Tharoor tapped his friends in other ministries — notably Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel whose daughter works for IPL — for information to be passed on to the Kochi bidding consortium, all place Tharoor in the cross-hairs of another statute: Sections 7 and 13 of the 1988 Prevention of Corruption Act provide for the prosecution of a public servant for criminal misconduct and for illegal gratification obtained for himself or another person.

Tharoor might conceivably have got away had his proximity with Pushkar not been conclusively established. That link-up truly completed the circle of impropriety. Having flaunted the relationship in public — at a book launch, an art exhibition, and even on an official visit to Assam state — and having failed to deny media reports of an impending marriage, no less, Tharoor cooked his own goose. Party insiders say the Congress high command conducted an internal probe with the help of two senior ministers, and concluded that Tharoor had indeed faltered.

With the prospect of a Bofors-like scam hanging over the Congress, Tharoor is lying low. His famous tweets have taken a breather. But if Kochi-gate revives cautionary memories of the Bofors deal for his party, Tharoor would have his own personal déjà vu to confront. Fighting his first student election at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College, he had coined a winning campaign slogan “Shashi Tharoor, Jeetega Zaroor.” Walking into the Prime Minister’s office with his resignation letter, the corridors of 7 Race Course Road would have, in his tortured mind, reverberated with shouts of “Shashi Tharoor, Jaayega Zaroor.”