Kharge and Rahul Gandhi meet Tharoor to resolve tensions ahead of the 2026 Kerala Assembly elections.
New Delhi: The Congress high command appeared to be treading cautiously over Kerala MP Shashi Tharoor's reported camaraderie with rival outfits. In a bid to settle the rivalries in the party’s Kerala unit, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi are expected to meet senior leaders from the Kerala unit in the national capital on Friday. Mr Kharge and Mr Gandhi had recently held a meeting with Mr Tharoor.
Different voices coming from party leaders in Kerala have worried the high command just a year before the state holds Assembly elections in 2026.
Interestingly, four-term Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor is also staking claim to the state leadership ahead of the Assembly elections in 2026. He has portrayed himself as somebody who has the ability to reach out to non-Congress voters, and thereby expand the party’s base.
Mr Tharoor not only wrote an article praising the Left-run Kerala government’s policies and has hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the United States, but on Tuesday he posted a photograph of himself with Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on X around the time of the India-UK talks on FTA.
Both Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi met Mr Tharoor to address his so-called “grievances”. Mr Tharoor feels that his services have not been utilised by the party. Earlier, he was a party spokesperson and then chief of the All India Professional Congress, but now he is just a Lok Sabha MP with no other responsibility.
Mr Tharoor, however, is in no mood to talk about the developments at this juncture. Justifying his acts, the Congress MP said: “For 16 years, I have been in politics. My attitude has been that when somebody in the government, whether it's our government or some other party's government, does the right thing or does something well, one should acknowledge and praise it, and when they do something badly, one should criticise it.”
Kerala Congress leader K. Muraleedharan reacted to Mr Tharoor’s statement and said it was not the stand of the Congress in Kerala. “What Tharoor said is not the stand of the Congress in Kerala. The national leadership should answer. Tharoor's stand is not acceptable to Congressmen in Kerala.”
AICC general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh also said there was democracy in the party but all utterances by party leaders do not necessarily reflect the views of the party.
Insiders claim that AICC general secretary (organization) and fellow Lok Sabha MP from Kerala K.C. Venugopal has also counselled Mr Tharoor over his grievances, but no specific result came out of it.
As the Assembly elections get near in Kerala, the Congress will have to work overtime to overthrow the CPI(M)-led Left Front which has been in power for 10 years now.
