Only a few days ahead of the Congress presidential election, Shashi Tharoor landed in a fresh controversy for releasing his manifesto (for the contest) with a map of India that does not have parts of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The document also has a typo on its last page. Many on social media have noted it to be “a massive goof-up” and “shameful”. The senior Congress leader has over 8 million Twitter followers.
The manifesto with the tagline ‘Think Tomorrow, Think Tharoor’ features a map with a network of dots representing Congress’s presence in different parts of India. The map is, however, different from India’s official map that includes parts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh occupied by Pakistan and China. Meanwhile, on the last page, tomorrow has been misspelled as tomorror.
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In 2019, he had shared some materials released by Kerala Congress as a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that also featured the wrong map of India. Later, Tharoor deleted the tweet after BJP’s IT Cell and leaders such as Sambit Patra critisiced it.
He’d said the map was to “depict not the territory but the people of India”.
The 66-year-old filed his nomination at the office of the Congress’ central election authority Madhusudan Mistry on Friday, the last day of the nomination process for the top post in the party long dominated by the Gandhi family.
Tharoor, seen as a rebel and one of the group of 23 leaders who wrote to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 seeking large scale reforms, now takes on veteran Mallikarjun Kharge, widely seen to be backed by senior leaders and tipped to win.
This is the first Congress chief election in over 20 years in which a Gandhi — current interim chief Sonia Gandhi and her son, MP Rahul Gandhi — aren’t contesting.
Polling for the post will take place on October 17 while the result will be announced on October 19.
Though Tharoor’s political journey began at 53, he took giant strides as a politician after winning the Lok Sabha election. His candidacy was opposed by a section of leaders of the Kerala Congress who viewed him as an outsider. Tharoor, however, won by a comfortable margin over his nearest opponent from the Communist Party of India.
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