Shashi Tharoor faces party’s ire for praising PM Modi, Congress to seek explanation from Kerala MP
Tharoor faced ire from his party colleagues for voicing agreement to fellow Congress leaders Abhishek Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh, who had said that demonising Modi would not help everytime.
Key Highlights
- Kerala’s Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran and Ramesh Chennithala, Leader of Opposition in Kerala Assembly, lashed out at Tharoor
Thiruvananthapuram: Congress Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor is in a soup over his comments praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee is expected to call him for an explanation over the matter.
According to reports, Tharoor will be asked to explain his stand in the next 24 hours as the KPCC has called for a high-level meeting for the same. However, no time limit has been set as to when the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram will be asked to respond.
Tharoor has faced a lot of ire from his party colleagues for voicing agreement to what fellow Congress leaders Abhishek Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh said – “demonising Prime Minister Narendra Modi every time won’t work”.
Kerala’s Congress chief Mullapally Ramachandran and Ramesh Chennithala, Leader of Opposition in Kerala Assembly, lashed out at Tharoor, while K Muraleedharan, Benny Behanan and TN Prathapan also took swipes at him.
“There is resentment within the Congress party against Tharoor and several leaders have expressed this to me. We have decided to seek an explanation from him. I want to make one thing clear. Praising Modi at the behest and at the expense of Congress will not be tolerated at any cost. Our decision has always been to take a strong stance against PM Modi and his policies. Our biggest narrative in the last Lok Sabha elections was precisely anti-Modi and that’s why we won 19 out of the 20 seats in Kerala. In such a situation, whatever explanation Tharoor gives us, Congress party’s workers in Kerala won’t accept it. Now, it is up to him to give an explanation in this matter. In the past five years, while in Opposition, Tharoor was one of the Opposition leaders who opposed PM Modi’s policies and I don’t understand as why he did a flip all of a sudden. The Congress is now fighting the fascist forces and whoever comes as an obstruction is only damaging the image of the Congress party,” Ramachandran said.
Chennithala had earlier said that the central government was making decisions that are unacceptable to the people of India and that there was no need to glorify Modi for one act. “Modi's rules and his actions are not supported by people...so there is no need to glorify his acts,” Chennithala was quoted as saying.
“If you demonise him (PM Modi) all the time, you will never be able to confront him,” Jairam Ramesh, former Union minister, had said last week. “PM Modi speaks in a language that connects with people. Till we recognise the fact that people recognise what he does, and we haven’t done those in the past, we will not be able to confront him.”