Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP, Shashi Tharoor, is likely to meet the party’s high command in New Delhi to negate accusations of “angling for a distant Kerala Chief Ministership and shoring up personal support for his independent political pitch by glad-handing community leaders outside the party’s organisational ambit”.
Mr. Tharoor, who had increased his stature in the Congress by making a robust but failed pitch for the All India Congress Committee (AICC) presidentship, is purported to be a possible candidate for a Congress Working Committee (CWC) membership. However, it is a race to be won at long odds, given the opposition to Mr. Tharoor in the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC).
Powerful factions in the KPCC question the political acceptability of Mr. Tharoor’s “brazen and selective courting” of influential leaders of community-based organisations in Kerala to allegedly advocate his case for the “Congress Legislative Party (CLP) leadership post in the 2026 Assembly elections”.
They feel Mr. Tharoor has inadvertently introduced an unwelcome element of caste identity in Congress politics in Kerala, which the KPCC believes is electorally and organisationally inexpedient for the party ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The Congress could also ill afford to have the electorate view its State leadership through the prism of caste.
In a recent interview to an online news media, KPCC president K. Sudharakan suggested that Mr. Tharoor’s political forays had roiled the party. He said AICC general secretary Tariq Anwar’s suggestion that Mr. Tharoor would serve the party better by working within the Congress’ organisational scope had a scarce effect.
Mr. Tharoor’s alleged pitch for Congress leadership has invited caustic comments from an array of senior leaders, including Ramesh Chennithala and Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan, prompting an AICC intervention to ease hostilities. Moreover, it has provoked some community-based leaders to dwell publicly on the caste equations in the KPCC, with one suggesting that Mr. Tharoor’s action illustrates that the Congress is an anti-backwards class political entity.
The KPCC has reportedly informed the high command that the controversies swirling around Mr. Tharoor’s “independent” political forays in Kerala have retarded the political momentum achieved by Rahul Gandhi’s Kerala leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
