What started off with a bang ended, ingloriously, with a tweet. Mr Shashi Tharoor, acclaimed writer, longtime international civil servant, India’s candidate for UN Secretary-General, and suave new-age Internet-savvy politician, finally had to depart under a cloud after a rocky 10 months, lurching from one crisis to another, as India’s junior foreign minister. It was perhaps his needless dabbling in efforts to cobble up an IPL team for Kochi that finally sealed his fate. Without doubt, as Thiruvananthapuram’s representative in the Lok Sabha, Mr Tharoor had every right to take more than a passing interest in getting a cricket franchise for his home state. But mentoring appears too inadequate a description of what he allegedly did. The disclosure that his friend Sunanda Pushkar was given free “sweat” equity worth around Rs 70 crore by the franchise owners created a cloud of suspicion, which soon darkened into a storm rattling the government and the Congress Party. Mr Tharoor’s considerable communication skills weren’t much help in his efforts to prove there was no hanky panky: the facts were too stark for the novelist to be able to obfuscate with a play of words, and carry conviction. The Opposition, unsurprisingly, smelt blood, while all that the Congress could smell was trouble. Ms Pushkar’s ill-advised last-minute damage control — sacrificing her free equity, and dissociating from the franchise at the eleventh hour — made things worse for Mr Tharoor. It only appeared to lend credence to the Opposition’s allegations. By the time the Congress core committee met on Sunday evening, it was evident that Mr Tharoor was on the way out. It was evident that the Congress president, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, did not want the party to exert itself in defending a minister mired in a controversy, which might get even worse in the days ahead. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who had allowed Mr Tharoor a lot of leeway when he got into earlier scrapes, had no choice but to ask him to go. Mr Tharoor’s exit signals the souring of a great promise — of a well-educated new-age politician giving a wide berth to sleaze. Mr Tharoor, who was to exemplify the New India and show others the way, instead invited trouble almost from the start. Soon after taking over, he embarrassed the government then in the middle of an austerity drive by staying at a five-star hotel suite costing Rs 40,000 a day. After that, it was one controversy after another — from ridiculing the austerity measures with his “cattle class” remark, mocking the policies of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, to openly criticising the government’s new visa guidelines. It almost seemed he could not let go of any issue without a foot-in-the-mouth comment. Worse, many of these smacked of elitism, something that politicians in any democracy should avoid like the plague for their own good. He also appeared to exude an air of contempt for the khadi-clad brigade, so it was really no surprise that when IPL commissioner Mr Lalit Modi set a trap for him through a tweet (could there be a greater irony?), he found himself virtually friendless in the Congress. The MP who won the Thiruvananthapuram seat with a one lakh-plus majority could not generate even a single demonstration in his favour in his constituency in the past one week.
Mr Tharoor held out great promise when he joined the government in 2009; but today hardly a tear will be shed over his departure. In Machiavellian terms, his downfall holds practical survival lessons for other new-age politicians — don’t act too smart, and remember that those who project themselves as a cut above the rest will surely be cut to size.