How Shashi Tharoor presented a rare political consensus on the Modi govt’s Pakistan policy

In a shrill world of high velocity mindless debates and moronic chants, education and erudition still count for a lot. Congress MP and speaker extraordinaire, Shashi Tharoor, proved it on Saturday.

In defence of India’s missile and drone strikes this week against Pakistan, the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha MP’s articulation and sophistication has earned him plaudits like no other Indian politician, even as the news of a tenuous ceasefire kicked in.

In a widely viewed and hailed interview with the Al Arabiya English news channel, Tharoor emphasised that India's actions were not an act of escalation but a "calibrated response" targeting terrorist infrastructure while taking deliberate care to avoid civilian casualties.

Defending India’s recent missile strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) as a measured and justified response to the deadly Pahalgam terror attack, which claimed 26 civilian lives, he pointed out that the global community has largely acknowledged India’s right to respond to cross-border terrorism. Countries like France, Russia, and Israel have extended their support, while even China offered a restrained reaction, urging peace, he noted.

According to Tharoor, this demonstrated that India acted responsibly and within reason—and any further tension will depend on how Pakistan chooses to react. ``Pakistani attackers won’t go unpunished – India’s response is justified, not an escalation,’’ he asserted.

On the India-Pakistan ceasefire agreement mediated by the USA, the Congress MP told ANI that he welcomed it. “Peace is essential; we need to have more details. I am very glad, India never wanted a long-term war, but India wanted to teach a lesson to terrorism.”

How can I trust her promises?

Later in the evening, when news trickled of how Pakistan was not strictly adhering to the cease fire, in a post on X, Tharoor put out a Hindi couplet: “Uski fitrat hai mukar jaane ki, uske vaade pe yakeen kaise karu (It's their nature to go back on their word, how can I trust her promises?)”.

In his 2012 book Pax Indica: India and the world of the 21st Century, Tharoor put forth his world view: ``As a major power India can and must play a role in helping shape the global order…India is well qualified to write those rules and define the norms that will guide tomorrow’s world…”

On the fractious Indian political chess board, where Congress president Rahul Gandhi has often been charged with `maligning’ the country, Tharoor’s show of political consensus is something that India could well do with.

At one stroke, it brought back memories of a time long gone by, when India needed to speak in one voice on Kashmir to counter a Pakistani onslaught.

BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then an opposition leader, provided it by leading an official delegation to the 1994 session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) and forcing the withdrawal of a resolution to censure India during the Narsimha Rao government. That team had senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid in its ranks.

The political triumph in Geneva, long before India became a member of the exclusive club of diplomatic potentates, had caught the country’s imagination and Vajpayee, Khurshid and other members of the delegation were treated like heroes on their return home.

Pakistan had got the Organisation of Islamic Countries (IOC) to move a resolution at the Geneva session of the UNCHC to censure India for the alleged human rights violations in Kashmir. If adopted, it would have been referred to the UN Security Council for economic sanctions against India.

Khurshid, then India’s deputy foreign minister, later recalled how the picture of Vajpayee embracing him made it to the cover of India Today and gave fodder to his detractors, who used it to spread the word during the 1996 Lok Sabha elections that he had “a secret deal with the BJP”.

Tharoor has lived up to his reputation for such political concord, but could it earn him a similar opprobrium from within his own ranks?