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Ashok Malik is a columnist and writer living in Delhi)
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Henry Kissinger is reputed to have commented, "It's a pity both can't lose." It is difficult to escape a similar conclusion as one watches the fractious battle between Mani Shankar Aiyar and Shashi Tharoor over whether or not Narendra Modi is "conciliatory and inclusive in both his pronouncements and his actions". The laudatory remarks formed part of a gushing piece that Tharoor wrote for the Huffington Post on how the former Gujarat chief minister had allegedly evolved into "Modi 2.0". (
Watch: Shashi Tharoor's High Praise For Narendra Modi)
Aiyar hit back, both at Modi and at Tharoor. At a facetious level, this could lead to the observation that Narendra Modi is such a divisive character, he has even divided the Congress' St Stephen's College Alumni Club. More substantively, what does one make of Aiyar's consistent mean-spiritedness as well as Tharoor's rather sudden change of assessment? (
Read: Don't Use 'Sycophant Terms Like Modi 1, Modi 2': Mani Shankar Aiyar's Advice to Shashi Tharoor)
Tharoor is a skilled and gifted writer. He is also a politician whose words will be inspected and interpreted differently from those of a conventional op-ed writer. He may claim those who have criticised his article or detected admiration for Modi are missing the "nuance" and failing to understand the deeper and recondite message. Like in several other cases, the man clearly protests too much.
Those who have followed Modi's career have known him to be a pugnacious, aggressive, flamboyant campaigner. In three successive elections in Gujarat - 2002, 2007, 2012 - right after a high-octane campaign and a victory, he slipped effortlessly into the sobriety of governance, quietly settling into office and even reaching out to political opponents. This is precisely what he has done on becoming prime minister in New Delhi.
Tharoor has either been ignorant of Modi's previous record or has deliberately missed it. Like many others in New Delhi - a classic power city, with time-serving, sycophantic instincts written into its DNA - he now claims Modi has changed. Is it Modi who has changed or has Tharoor's gaze?
Let's be generous and take Tharoor at face value. Perhaps he genuinely thinks Modi was a monster till May 16 (when the votes were counted) or May 26 (when he took office) but has now "remade himself from a hate figure into an avatar of modernity and progress". What evidence can Tharoor cite to attest to this so-called re-making? Modi has been prime minister for less than a fortnight. He has announced no new policies and enunciated no new economic or social programme; even his adherents will concede it is much too early. Yet, purely on the basis of a few gestures and symbols, Tharoor has rushed to offer him certificates he (Modi) never asked for.
More than Modi, what does this tell us about Tharoor? Does it tell us that for all his intellect and learning, he is a man taken in by frivolity and superficiality, by externalities and appearances? This would appear to be so on reading an article where the author describes himself, absolutely unselfconsciously, as a "prominent adversary" of Modi's "with whom he [Modi] had crossed swords in the past".
This leaves us with Aiyar, the obverse side of the coin, a person who has already dismissed Modi's prime ministry as a disaster - rushing to judgement (albeit an opposite judgement) almost as quickly as Tharoor. Aiyar has learnt nothing. His mocking of Modi's tea vendor background handed the BJP leader a massive advantage in the election campaign. It is impossible to quantify this, but Aiyar's thoughtless and tasteless put-down must have contributed a sizeable number of votes to Modi. Is Aiyar even remotely apologetic, if not to decency then to his party?
For all
his intellect and learning, Aiyar can be a remarkably shallow man. In the mid-1990s, Aiyar was a columnist with India Today magazine and it was this writer's job to edit and put to page his articles. One week, he began a piece with the sentence, "Each time S. Jaipal Reddy opens his mouth, he puts his crutch into it." The line would leave most readers cringing, especially since Reddy, then a minister in the United Front government, is physically challenged and walks with a crutch.
I phoned Aiyar and urged him to change the line. He refused, protested, screamed and insisted my request amounted to censorship. I was left astonished, wondering how someone with such an education could be capable of so petty and cheap a dig and would even insist on it. Backed by India Today's editors, I stood my ground and the line was amended.
The episode left me perplexed and I shrugged off Aiyar as an idiosyncratic and eccentric person. Yet, in the years to come, it became obvious that there was an unusually bitter and vicious streak to his writing and his word play. From Reddy's crutch to Modi's chai-wallah origins, nothing had changed. Indeed, when Aiyar implies Tharoor is being sycophantic, he fails to notice his own CV in politics, embellished largely by supplying encomia to various generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family and harking back to an India of privilege that no longer exists.
Aiyar and Tharoor typify the two ends of the Congress predicament. Trapped between an ostrich and a chameleon, between attributes of obduracy and fickleness, how can the party reinvent itself?
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Also Read: Mani-Talk - Will The Real Shashi Tharoor, Please Stand Up?)
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