Shashi Tharoor, Swamy and the Obsession With Urbane, Erudite Politicians

How the middle class dream of 'educated' politicians has evolved.

Most of us in the Indian middle class grew up feeling our politicians were all corrupt, boorish, lazy, violent, uneducated, and corrupt some more. No one wanted to go anywhere close to a politician, for fear of being exploited without repercussion. And for good reason - a family friend got a large order from a politician. Fulfilled it. Politician never paid, and she was too terrified to collect.

We attributed all the problems we faced to these uneducated, corrupt politicians. And we had so many problems!

• We were the only ones who paid our taxes honestly, and it was a huge burden when we lived paycheck to paycheck.

• These taxes were used for freebies and illegal inducements to win votes, like alcohol distributed to the poor in exchange for attending political rallies.

• Caste and religion were used as a wedge to divide people so these politicians could win votes.

• Reservations made it harder to access higher education.

• There were not enough job opportunities for those with higher education

• Merit didn’t count for much, access to opportunities depended on your connections and “influence”.

• The international image of India was dismal.

Four Horsemen Of Indian Middle-class Aspirations

Director Shankar made an entire career from catering to this sentiment. The movie Gentleman had Arjun Sarja robbing the wealthy to construct a university to make education open to everyone with no barriers of income, caste or religion. And - get this - he does this because his best friend and his mother committed suicide because corruption and reservation got in the way of his pursuing higher education, despite scoring very high.

His other movie Anniyan had a rule-abiding, mild-mannered protagonist who was so affected by government employees not following rules that he developed a split personality where he would go around murdering corrupt bureaucrats and contractors using descriptions of hell from the Garuda Puranam.

But the one that most captured all our imagination was Mudhalvan/Nayak where a reporter gets to become the Chief Minister for one day, and ends up making the whole state run efficiently, firing corrupt officers, giving people their dues that have been pilfered, and fighting the corrupt, egoistic ministers who want to destroy him.

We wanted a politician like us, the everyman, who had excelled at something on his own merit, and was receptive to our concerns. We didn’t feel needed electorally, having neither money nor numbers to contribute to a political party.

The Highly Educated Prime Minister

After the UPA won in 2004, I remember my parents reading an article, presumably the famous one by Sanjaya Baru, suggesting that Manmohan Singh ought to be the consensus candidate for Prime Minister. “Such accomplished people should be the Prime Minister,” my mom said to my dad, who responded with “No, they’ll never allow him to succeed.”

Manmohan Singh was soft-spoken, had a PhD in economics, was widely credited with rescuing the country from crisis in 1991 and ushering in economic reforms. He had risen to the post of RBI Governor and Finance Minister from abject poverty and displacement during the Partition. What could go wrong?

It became quite clear that Manmohan Singh had little to no say in the UPA government. His soft-spokenness, which endeared him to us, now was a liability.

And most of all, he was a Rajya Sabha MP. While the RS is supposed to be MPs representing their states, it is mostly a method to get people into the cabinet who are too “delicate” for the blood, sweat and tears of electoral politics. He had no standing on the ground, which meant he was pushed hither and thither and no one listened to him.

By 2009-2011, it became quite clear that just plain education wasn’t sufficient. Neither was personal morality and uprightness - Manmohan Singh, it came out, presided over some epic corruption and did nothing about it.

Enter Shashi Tharoor

The 2006 election for the UN Secretary General had an unexpected candidate - Shashi Tharoor from India. He was a senior officer in the UN already, was a biographer of Jawaharlal Nehru, and was quite well-known for his writing and columns in Indian newspapers.

At this point, I was idealistic and fresh out of college, and had read his essay collection Bookless In Baghdad cover to cover and had never felt so seen before. He wrote about books from a very contemporary, urbane Indian perspective. I’d never seen that before. Sure, RK Narayan did, a lot, as did several others in the columns of India Today, The Week and Outlook. But Tharoor’s perspective transcended the ‘we are like this only’ self-deprecation, and was just unabashedly passionate about reading and literature. Unlike a lot of other writers in India, he wasn’t the son or nephew or anyone famous. His father was a publishing exec, a Malayalee in Calcutta, no fancy connections.

It was quite a big deal that an Indian was audacious enough to go for the top job at a global forum, and we cheered him on.

This was before you could look up your favorite author’s lurid personal life in graphic detail, so I had a gigantic crush on this writer, having no clue of his much-married salacious past.

He lost to Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea. Everyone wondered, what would be next for him? President? Some other UN job?

To everyone’s surprise, he came back to India, and joined the Congress, which at that point was not the party of choice for young urban professionals. In the 2009 elections, he stood from Thiruvananthapuram! And beating all blackpill discourse about how they’d never allow an accomplished professional with no connection to succeed, he won! And he got a respectable position in the Ministry of External Affairs.

The honeymoon didn’t last. When Twitter was new, he tweeted something about Economy rail travel being ‘cattle class’, and was forced to apologize when it was perceived as anti-poor. But that was because he was so urbane and polished and well-read and British that no one understood his sophisticated humor.

Then he was accused of corruption at a massive scale with an IPL cricket team. This was a complete no-no. He was barely a few years in politics when it came out, and that dented his urbane, sophisticated, incorruptible image.

But close to the end of the UPA regime, he was accused of abetting the “suicide” of his wife. I put suicide in quotes because everything about it was suspicious. His wife has a spat on Twitter with a Pakistani journalist, accusing her of having an affair with Tharoor, and being an ISI agent a few days before she died. His wife and he are seen arguing the evening before. They have construction ongoing in their house, so they go to stay at the Leela Palace Hotel. She texts top journalists at night to show up for a press conference the following morning. When they show up, she’s dead.

She’s been seen with bruises, and those are attributed to… Lupus. By now we’ve all been watching House MD for a while, so we’re suspicious. And the cameras in the Leela Palace aren’t working on that day, quite conveniently. And Educated Politician Arun Shourie’s sister Nalini Singh is on all the news channels talking about her last interactions with the dead woman.

At this point, the UPA is in power and isn’t exactly known for its commitment to truth and justice, especially when its politicians are involved, so it all remains quite suspicious.

Shashi Tharoor, in the eyes of a significant number of people, stops being the good-looking woman-respecting highly-educated types. Sure, the court cleared him of all charges in 2021, but the stain remains.

A big contributor to this is his fellow Educated Internationally-Acclaimed Politician, Subramanian Swamy.

Swamy, the Maverick Hitman

In the 2011-2014 era, a new middle-class hero emerges - Subramanian Swamy.

There is too much to go into detail about Swamy, but here’s the rough sketch - he was considered a Narada type of politician who goes around making trouble and having no ethics or principles. But starting in 2011-2012, he starts touring the world, giving anti-UPA speeches to students and other young people, and you see these speeches on Youtube as well.

He makes himself out to be every middle class youth’s wet dream.

• He advocates for no income taxes as they are used to oppress the middle class

• He wants to make it easier for Indian youth to become rich as entrepreneurs.

• He talked of Indian unity, acknowledging that all our ancestors were Hindus, with his bonafides being his fifty-year marriage to a Parsee woman, where neither of them changed their faith or practices.

• He completed his PhD in economics at Harvard at an absurdly young age, under a renowned economist, was a Professor at Harvard as well, and then came to teach at IIT Delhi. He was fired unfairly for preaching free-market economics and was kicked out unceremoniously. He fought his own case and won decades of back-pay.

• While he had a warrant against him during the Emergency, he went underground, and back to the US, and then flew back to India, used some brave trickery to enter the Parliament, make a short speech on the tyranny of Indira Gandhi, and before he could be captured, he ran away and went underground and lived in various disguises until the Emergency was lifted.

• He was not afraid of legal battles, and came up with interesting solutions to decades-long problems.

• He had been a minister, and talked of his achievements when he was in government, and gladly explained away his previous missteps and conflicting opinions.

• He didn’t shy away from accusing those in government of corruption and going to court over it.

Now it’s been a while, so I don’t recall how the legal arguments panned out, or if all he said made sense. But he seemed like a new breed - the Tough Educated Politician. His speeches were heady, he aligned with the BJP, and he was happy to be the middle class face of the BJP.

One thing he did, though - he called the other Urban Erudite Politicians weak and stupid. He said Chidambaram, the former Finance Minister, who proudly touted his own Harvard credentials, was his student and had failed his class. He called out Arvind Kejriwal’s antics as being Naxalite drama. But more than anything, he took up the case of Shashi Tharoor’s dead wife on a war footing.

He suggested, as is the law in India, Shashi Tharoor needs to be taken into judicial custody for questioning as his wife died within 7 years of marriage. He called him ‘Shampoo Boy’ and asserted that he was not tough enough to withstand interrogation and would break down on cross-questioning. He even said she had died of polonium poisoning.

His slow decline in politics is a saga unto itself, and I won’t go into that.

But the middle class of India had a new Messiah.

Kejriwal - IIT, IAS, Magsaysay Award

There’s a very long post to be written about the antics of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party, and to track all of the India Against Corruption movement. When I read the Wikipedia article now, it seems like a proto-color revolution.

Anyway. People were exhausted with the UPA’s corruption. Strong protests erupted, and Right To Information activist Arvind Kejriwal emerged as the leader of the India Against Corruption movement. There were A LOT of urban, educated (not always erudite) professionals in his movement. There was the first female police commissioner, Kiran Bedi, General VK Singh, Justice Santosh Hegde — a veritable who’s who of accomplished bureaucrats, journalists and spiritual leaders. And there were youthful scions of relatively unknown political families as well, like Shazia Ilmi.

The term ‘civil society’ was thrown around a lot, and given to mean ‘people like us’. People who were accomplished by virtue of their own efforts, not from their connections, and who wanted others serving the people to do their jobs properly instead of giving in to corruption and political influence.

Long story short, the Aam Aadmi Party emerged out of this, with Arvind Kejriwal as its leader. They aimed to contest the Delhi elections.

The Congress was essentially urban elites ruling in alliance with rural satraps. So while they’d have pedigreed foreign-educated scions and their hangers-on, they’d also have feudal lord sorts.

The AAP turned this on its head. They were contesting only in Delhi. Their focus was on urban issues and creating a new model of governance. This had a lot of support, and they didn’t need to go for the dreaded ‘caste arithmetic’ that the news channels said decided every election.

It worked! AAP got the Chief Ministership of Delhi.

Many people were making Mudhalvan/Nayak memes, where the Common Man finally won.

But, remember, at the end of Mudhalvan, Arjun Sarja says “They made me into a politician, too”.

Kejriwal had massive corruption accusations, with him and his ministers going to prison. One more ‘Educated Politician’ dream died.

How the BJP Killed The ‘Educated Politician’ Dream

The BJP, helped by the RSS, came to power in 2014, on an agenda of anti-corruption and development.

One thing even the RSS’s enemies acknowledge is that they are an organization built on discipline. The BJP is possibly much less disciplined, but it’s a lean mean election-winning machine which makes sure that the cream rises to the top.

Its focus on winnability meant the best people at all levels are rewarded with more responsibility. Its focus on Hindu consolidation means it’s not going to fiddle with ‘caste arithmetic’, not at a macro level anyway. Speeches by its politicians focus more on issues with broad appeal than speaking in different tongues to different interest groups, an art form the Congress had perfected. With Youtube in the mix, you can’t say different things to differently people, they all listen to your speeches online and catch you out.

Talented people like General VK Singh, Supercop Kiran Bedi, tech entrepreneur Rajeev Chandrashekhar, S Jaishankar of the foreign service, and many such others joined the BJP and helped tick all the boxes that the middle class wanted.

Compared to the list I created in the beginning of the article, the BJP government:

• Focused on winning the votes of a broad coalition of people.

• Increased the number of IITs and AIIMS and other institutions of higher education so reservations don’t pinch as bad.

• Provided a better environment for entrepreneurship, and improved the economy so opportunities didn’t feel limited.

• Led with merit in its own party.

• Improved the international image of India.

Many still complain of taxes but the latest budget has fixed that complaint also.

Besides, the children of the ‘80s and ‘90s came of age during this period, as did cheap broadband internet. Urbanization had increased since the 90s, and the reforms had given more opportunities to a wider variety of people. Tech brought prosperity to young people across the board as they crowded into urban centers to work at Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Accenture.

The urban-rural divide hasn’t been lower in post-independence India.

And relatable politicians with middle class upbringings are now a dime a dozen. Smriti Irani could talk about her experience growing up with a single mom and finally having the money to buy things she considered unimaginable luxuries, like a sandwich at a fancy restaurant, and she isn’t the only such story.

Heck, Sudha Murthy of Infosys fame is now a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP. Mr. and Mrs. Murthy were always parading themselves as relateable middle-class folks and Infosys as the company that prioritized merit and raised up the middle class, and now they seem to have doubled down for some reason, even bringing out a book about their love story.

Which makes one wonder — what exactly is exciting about Shashi Tharoor anymore?

What Shashi Tharoor means to a section of India today

Shashi Tharoor is a politician who wins because of his caste’s votebank. He has been accused of big money corruption, and has been out on bail for abetment of his wife’s suicide. There is nothing particularly special about him.

I remember a Stephens Vs Hindu College alumni debate, where there were stalwart politicians on both sides, and Tharoor came off as too clever by half. He questioned the premise of the debate, and promptly got shut down by (I think) Kanwal Sibal. That’s the sort of thing that works in college, but not when everyone’s practiced in clarity of thought.

But something about him still has a section of media and society screaming “One of us! One of us!”

The latest rumor that he might be quitting the Congress has journalists like one-time middle-class heroine Barkha Dutt so excited that she’s done three hour-long shows just on that. There are many who say he is the “right man in the wrong party” and wish desperately that he floats his own political party.

Why, though? Those are the people who are tired of the Gandhi family’s hold over the Congress. The BJP isn’t suave and erudite enough for them, given the heavy subaltern presence in the party, including a Prime Minister who speaks English like a second language. They want a magical third political party that is the Congress, but free of its urban-dyansties-with-regional-satraps design, and this is their last chance at something like that after the last 300 attempts failed.

They probably know Tharoor breaking out on his own is doomed. He isn’t an organization man. And everyone probably has too much Kompromat on him. When a hardcore organization man like Ghulam Nabi Azad, the formerCM of J&K, couldn’t get too far with his breakaway political party, what hope does Mr. Tharoor have?

But mentees of Prannoy Roy, like Barkha Dutt or Rajdeep Sardesai, long for a time when urbane, sophisticated, hardworking elite like them were rare and respected, and weren’t forced to prove their worth in a sea of hungry strivers. To them, Tharoor represents the return of the old days.

You don’t have to be a Roy’s Boy to have that vision, though. As a recovering Westernized Indian, it does feel like a lot of our vision of the future was essentially India being a kind of vassal state of the West. It’s not our fault, that’s the media and propaganda we were exposed to. Shashi Tharoor is the endgame of that propaganda, whether he intends it or not.

No more urbane, sophisticated politicians, please

There was this party run by IIT grads, called the Lok Paritrana party. They contested elections and started having some pretty strong ground presence.

But here’s where it gets interesting. They found it more profitable if they built up their presence to be big enough to be a threat to some of the bigger political parties, and then the coaxed one or more of them to pay them to drop out.

They’d make this deal. Convince the candidate to drop out. Anger among the rank and file. They’d pipe down until the anger died down. They’d rise back up with a new team and rinse, repeat. How disgusting!

We in India worship education and erudition. We’d been denied this long enough that the middle class began to fetishize it. But after successive cohorts of urbane, sophisticated politicians ending up just like everyone else, sometimes far worse, I, at least, am cured of this fascination.

Education is more within reach. We have more 1-1 connect with politicians irrespective of our social standing.

The skills it takes to succeed in politics involve being high-energy and high-agency. What we want on top of that is high integrity, which comes from a proven track record of working in politics. It’s becoming clearer that no political party will succeed unless it has cadre-based leadership, which will give us more politicians with a long-standing track record.

I have high hopes for the future of Indian politics.