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?

Yet Tharoor’s high-flying act withered in just a week in the Delhi summer heat.
The same Congress Party bosses, who had welcomed his entry into Indian politics
with a parliamentary seat and a ministerial berth less than a year ago,
demanded his resignation and hung him out to dry, after the media exposed
salacious details of his involvement in promoting an Indian Premier League
cricket franchise.

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.

The first of them, I call the “Babe-in-the-Woods” card. Tharoor used
the handy all-purpose shield — “I’m new to Indian politics” — whenever his
actions of lobbying for the Kochi franchise were brought into question. Included in its subtext was the
initiate’s ignorance of the traditional — and therefore, less than desirable? —
modes of doing political business. At a subliminal level, Tharoor was telling
us that he, anointed as a harbinger of change in Indian politics, derived his
style from western models: Like him, Britain’s Foreign Secretary tweets, as
does the Australian Prime Minister and Hillary Clinton; President Obama’s
election campaign used an email network to stunning effect, and French
President Nicolas Sarkozy comes to official functions carrying a glamorous
Carla Bruni on his arm.

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.

To deflect allegations that his girlfriend — the sometime beautician,
sometime receptionist, sometime sales/event manager, sometime senior business
professional, Sunanda Pushkar — was a front for kickbacks as consideration for
Tharoor’s professed services as “mentor and advisor” in bagging the franchise,
Tharoor whipped out his “Gender-Sexism” card. “It’s really insulting how our
media can’t accept the notion of an attractive woman being a capable
professional in her own right,” he bristled in a television interview.

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.

And the so-called surrender of the sweat-equity by the
beneficiary-girlfriend would not absolve those guilty of effecting and/or
abetting that transaction in the first place. Returning a bribe does not wipe
out the taint or the illegality of giving or receiving it. If anything, it is
an indirect admission of guilt and a botched attempt at an incriminating
cover-up.

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.”