Shashi Tharoor

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Shashi Tharoor (born 9 March 1956) is an Indian politician, writer, and a former international diplomat who is currently serving as Member of Parliament in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

He also serves as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology and All India Professionals Congress.

Tharoor began as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs in London, UK, and raised in India. He earned his degree in 1975 with a doctorate in International Relations and Diplomacy from Tufts University.

He was the youngest person at the time to be honoured by the Fletcher School at the age of 22.

Tharoor served as a United Nations career official from 1978 to 2007, rising to the rank of Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information in 2001.

He resigned after finishing second in the 2006 competition for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Tharoor began his political career in 2009 by joining the Indian National Congress and winning the Lok Sabha elections and becoming a Member of Parliament.

Tharoor wrote 18 bestselling books of fiction and non-fiction, 2001–2014, which are based on India's past, culture, film, education, foreign policy, and other topics during the Congress-led government period (2004–2014).

He has contributed to hundreds of columns and articles in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, and The Times of India.

For two years, he was a contributing editor for Newsweek International.

He wrote a column in The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, and, for the most part of 2012, a column in Mail Today; he also wrote a monthly column for Project Syndicate, ranging from 2010 to 2012.

He also wrote regular columns for The Indian Express (1991-1993 and 1996–2001), The Hindu (2001–2008), and The Times of India (2007–2009).

Early life and education

Shashi Tharoor was born in London, United Kingdom, on March 10, 1956, to Chandran Tharoor and Sulekha Menon, a Malayali couple from Palakkad, Kerala. Shobha and Smitha, two younger sisters, are twins in Tharoor. His father, a native of Kerala, served in various capacities in London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, including a 25-year stint with The Statesman as a group advertising manager. Parameshwaran Tharoor, the founder of Reader's Digest in India, was his paternal uncle.

When Tharoor's parents were two years old, he returned to India, where he began the Montfort School in Yercaud in 1962, later moving to Bombay (now Mumbai) and studying at the Campion School (1963-68). He spent his high school years at St. Xavier's Collegiate School in Kolkata (1969–71). Chippukutty Nair, Shashi's paternal grandfather, was a painter.

Tharoor earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from St Stephen's College, University of Delhi, where he had served as president of the student union and also founded the St. Stephen's Quiz Club in 1975. Tharoor obtained an M.A. in the United States within the same year. International Relations at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in Medford, and its Institute of International Relations. After obtaining his M.A. degree, he obtained his M.A. Tharoor earned his Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 1977 and a Ph.D. in International Relations and Affairs in 1978. Tharoor, who was pursuing his doctorate, was honoured the Robert B. Stewart Prize for best student and was also the first editor of the Fletcher Forum of International Affairs. He was the youngest student to be granted a doctorate in the Fletcher School's history at the age of 22.

Personal life

Tilottama Mukherji, a half-Bengali and half-Kashmiri academic, and Kailash Nath Katju's granddaughter were among Tharoor's first wives. Tharoor and Mukherji had been high school sweethearts and were married in 1981. Tilottama took her husband's name and began teaching English at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic University, as well as as a freelance writer. Kanishk and Ishaan's twin brothers were born prematurely in 1984 at the KK Hospital in Singapore. Ishaan is a former senior editor at Time magazine and now writes about international affairs for The Washington Post. Kanishk is a former editor at Open Democracy and is the author of the highly lauded short story collection Swimmer Among The Stars. Tilottama is a professor of humanities at New York University.

At some point, Tharoor and Tilottama were divorced. Christa Giles, a Canadian diplomat working at the United Nations, was married in 2007 by Tharoor. This marriage was short-lived and childless. On August 22, 2010, Tharoor's next married Dubai-based businesswoman Sunanda Pushkar at his ancestral home in Elavanchery village in Kerala's Palakkad district. He was her third husband and step-father to her son Shiv Menon, who was born of a previous marriage. Pushkar (aged 51), a resident of Chanayapuri, New Delhi, died on January 17 under unexplained circumstances. Tharoor was charged in May 2018 with inciting suicide of his wife and marital violence under sections 306 and 498A of the Indian Penal Code. A court in Delhi dismissed Tharoor from all charges on 18 August 2021.

Tharoor, a vegetarian, "abhors the prospect of eating the bodies of animals," but he claims he does not have a problem with those who do. He has stated that he is "very proud of being a Hindu" and that he is a "worshipping" and "believing Hindu." Tharoor also claims to have read a "fair amount" of the Upanishads.

Tharoor died during a Thulabharam service at a temple in Thiruvananthapuram in April 2019. After being released, he requested an inquiry by the government into the incident.

Malayalam is his mother tongue.

Shashi Tharoor was one of the first nine celebrities nominated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 to raise concerns about sanitation, hygiene, and good sanitation, as well as make Swachh Bharat Mission a people's movement. He responded by sweeping the Vizhinjam port on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram's outskirts.

He is currently on the Board of Advisors of India's International Movement to Unify Nations (I.M.U.N.). (Which has been a favorite of mine for many years.)

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Diplomatic career

Tharoor's career in the United Nations began in 1978 as a staff member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. He was in charge of the UNHCR's Singapore office from 1981 to 1984, leading the organisation's rescue efforts at sea and success in settling a backlog of Vietnamese refugees. He also handled cases involving Polish and Acehnese refugees. Tharoor left UNHCR after a second stint at Geneva's UNHCR headquarters, during which he became the first chairman of the UNHCR staff elected by UNHCR workers around the world. He was named special assistant to the Under-Secretary General for Special Political Affairs in 1989, which later became the Peacekeeping Operations Department in New York. He commanded the team in charge of peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia from 1996, spending a considerable amount of time on the ground during the civil war.

Tharoor was appointed Director of Communications and Special Projects as well as Executive Assistant to Secretary General Kofi Annan in 1996. Tharoor was appointed Interim Head of the Department of Public Information (DPI) at the Assistant-Secretary-General level in January 2001. He was later announced as the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information (UNDPI), which would take effect from 1 June 2002. He was in charge of the United Nations' communications policy, as well as improving the organization's image and effectiveness. The Secretary-General gave him the additional charge of United Nations Coordinator for Multilingualism in 2003. Tharoor reformed the department and undertook a number of initiatives, including the first-ever UN seminar on Antisemitism, the first-ever UN seminar on Islamophobia, and the unveiling of a monthly list of "Ten Under-Reported News the World Ought to Know About," which was last edited in 2008 by his successor.

Tharoor resigned from the Under-Secretary-General's post on February 9, 2007, leaving the UN on April 1, 2007.

Tharoor's government nominated him for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006. After the 46-year-old Dag Hammarskjöld, if he won, Shashi Tharoor would have been the second-youngest Secretary-General. Despite the fact that all previous Secretaries-General had come from small countries, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan's candidacy indicated that India's desire to play a bigger role in the United Nations.

In each of the four straw polls conducted by the UN Security Council, Tharoor came in second, behind Ban Ki-moon of South Korea. Ban emerged as the only candidate not to be vetoed by one of the permanent members, while Tharoor received one veto from the United States. The United States has been voted the capital of the United States. "We don't want a strong Secretary General," Ambassador John Bolton later revealed. Tharoor was a protégé of the liberated Kofi Annan, and a senior American official told Tharoor that the United States was determined to have "No more Kofis." Tharoor resigned after the vote, but Ban Ki-moon refused to continue in service beyond the expiration of his term as Under-Secretary-General.

Post-UN career

Tharoor may be admitted into the Council of Ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in February 2007, amid rumors about his post-UN fate. Tharoor was a finalist for the position of dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication in Los Angeles in the first month, but he was denied admission at the end of the process. Instead, Tharoor took over chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures, which established the Afras Academy for Business Communication (AABC), in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the city in which he would go on to win a historic three parliamentary elections. He also spoke about India and Kerala, where he spent more time before heading for good to India in October 2008.

Tharoor served on the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute, the board of trustees, and the advisory boards of the Indo-American Arts Council, the World Policy Journal, Virtue Foundation, and the human rights group Breakthrough before embarking on his political careers. He founded and was the first chair of the editorial board of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, a journal that discusses international relations, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976. Tharoor served as an international advisor to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva from 2008 to 2011. He served on the Hague Institute for International Justice's advisory board and was named Fellow of the New York Institute for Human Rights from 1995 to 1996. He also supported various educational causes, including as Patron of GEMS Modern Academy in Dubai.

Political career in India

Tharoor also stated that when he started his political career, the Communist Party and the BJP met him. He elected Congress because he was politically involved with it. Tharoor ran in the Indian General elections in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, in March 2009. P. Ramachachran Nair of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Neelalohitadharan of the Bahujan Samaj Party (NCP), and Bharatiya Janata Party leader P. Krishna Das of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Tharoor gained the elections by a slim margin of 99,989. Despite accusations that he was a "elite stranger." He was later chosen as a Minister of State in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Council of Ministers. On May 28, 2009, he was sworn in as Minister of State for External Affairs, in charge of Africa, Latin America, and the Gulf, as well as the Ministry's Consular, Passports, and Visas. He revived long-dormant diplomatic relations with African countries, where his fluency in French made him popular with Francophone countries and their heads of state.

Tharoor was the first person to use social media as a tool of political communication. He was India's most followed politician on Twitter until 2013, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi overtook him. In the past, some of his Twitter messages have been criticized and have been portrayed in a negative manner by the opposition and journalists.

He was also the first Indian minister to visit Haiti after the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti. He modified the arrangements relating to the Haj pilgrimage's conduct. During his 11-month tenure as Minister, he initiated new policy-planning efforts on the Indian Ocean and represented India at various international conferences. Following allegations that he had mishandled his office to gain stakes in the IPL cricket corporation, he resigned from the position in April 2010. Tharoor denied the charges and called for a complete inquiry during his resignation address in Parliament. "I was never involved in a corruption of any kind in the IPL-I was fired because [I had] fought extensively with the extensive probe that had been conducted by the Enforcement Directorate into the whole issue," he said in a 2014 rejoinder. No wrongdoing had been found.

Tharoor remained active in Parliament between 2010 and 2012, as member-convenor of the Parliamentary Forum on Disaster Management, a member of the Standing Committee on Defence, and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Telecoms. He was in several important discussions of the 15th Lok Sabha, including the Lokpal Bill, the request for grants of the Ministry of External Affairs and Industry, the black money debate, and so forth. Tharoor, one of four members of the Indian Parliament, including party President Sonia Gandhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and House Speaker Pranab Mukherjee, was invited to address the Lok Sabha in the special debate on the 60th anniversary of the Indian Parliament.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh re-inducted Tharoor into the Union Council of Ministers in 2012, with the post of minister of state for Human Resources. In this role, he was particularly interested in adult education's and challenges, as well as the advancement of high-quality research by academic institutions. During the Lok Sabha's Question Hour, he was responsible for the ministry's written responses to Parliament's questions and responded to oral questions regarding education. In a context of India's demographic transitions, he delivered a glimpse of the country's educational challenges, but also a national security problem.

Tharoor, as the first elected representative of Thiruvananthapuram, was the first elected representative in India to publish annual reports on his work as MP, as well as providing details of his MPLADS spending. In 2012, he published a half-term study followed by a full-length analysis.

Tharoor won re-election from Thiruvananthapuram in May 2014, defeating O. Rajagopal of the Bharatiya Janata Party by a margin of around 15,700 votes and becoming a member of the 16th Lok Sabha sitting in Opposition. He had been elected Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. On October 13, 2014, Shashi Tharoor was dropped from the position of congress spokesperson after celebrating the work of his opposition, Prime Minister Modi.

"For an Opposition MP to have and exercise the right to applaud a noble thing done by the government and for a sitting party MP to speak and vote against the party line is not only the fundamental of parliamentary democracy," The Telegraph's comment on Tharoor's ouster from the post of congress spokesperson. Shashi Tharoor, a member of the Congress, has attempted to do that; there is not one BJP MP who has matched him. Blind conformism is not loyalty nor independent thinking, dissent."

Tharoor was asked to assist with the treasury benches draft, condemning Pakistan for freeing Zaki-Rehman Lakhvi, the Lashkar-e-Toiba chief who planned the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people. In January 2015, Tharoor asked not to debunk credible contributions of Ancient Indian Science due to the exaggerations of the Hindutva brigade, which are reflected in the 2015 Indian Science Congress ancient aircraft controversy.

Tharoor's call in March 2017 called for the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata to be turned into a museum in India on the effects of British colonial rule. After nearly two centuries of looting and exploitation, one of the world's poorest, most ill, and most literate nations by the time they left in 1947, Tharoor wrote in an Al Jazeera column that the British "conquered one of the world's richest countries" (27 percent of global gross domestic product in 1700) and reduced it to. ...Nowhere is a monument to the Raj's massacres, from Delhi in 1857 to Amritsar in 1919, the deaths of 35 million Indians in completely unnecessary famines caused by British [policies]"

Despite the fact that Tharoor ran as the Prime Minister candidate in the 2019 General Elections, he has disowned, downplayed, and distanced himself from any such online campaigns run by his large number of followers.

In addition, Tharoor has attempted to introduce a number of Private Members Bills in Parliament. Notably, the majority of parliamentarians rejected his attempts to update Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code on two occasions. The Apex court of India later ruled in favour of updating the contentious article in 2018, thereby vindicating Tharoor's position.

Literary career

Tharoor has been a columnist in each of India's three most well-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindu (2001-2008) and "Shashi on Sunday," in the Times of India (January 2007 – December 2008). Following his departure as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy in the Deccan Chronicle. He served as a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a regular contributor to Newsweek International and the International Herald Tribune. His book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers. "India Reawakening," Project Syndicate's monthly column, appears in 80 newspapers around the world. Tharoor has written twenty-three books in English as of 2021.

Tharoor began writing at the age of 6, and his first published story appeared in The Free Press Journal's Sunday edition in Mumbai at age 10. Operation Bellows, a WW adventure book based on the Biggles books, was serialized in the Junior Statesman a week before his 11th birthday. As of October 2014, the Great Indian Novel had 43 reprints, and the book's 25th anniversary, by Viking Penguin India, was published on the Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone. In his address to the Indian parliament in 2000, President Bill Clinton cited Shashi Tharoor's book India From Midnight to the Millennium.

Tharoor has written extensively about India, and has been criticized for his research, including, "India is not, as people keep saying, an underdeveloped country," he said, but rather, in the context of its past and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in a mature state of decay." "If America is a melting pot, then India is a thali," he says. Each has unique tastes and does not necessarily match with the others, but they do share the dish and complement each other in making the meal a delectable repast."

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Shashi Tharoor's non-fiction book An Era of Shadow, published in the United Kingdom later in the year, arose as a result of a speech he made at the Oxford Union in 2016. It has sold over 100,000 copies in hardback reprints and continues to be a top-selling product in the country. In the London Evening Standard's bestseller lists, the British version topped No. 1. Since then, he has written two other non-fiction books: Why I Am A Hindu (2018) and The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018), both of which have been published in the Indian subcontinent by the Aleph Book Company. Both books, which are bestsellers in India, raised some critical concerns. Why I Am a Hindu argues that it is precisely because Hindus make up the majority that India has survived as a plural, secular democracy, a status that has come under attack in the modern world. The The The The Paraphrasedoutput was a critical review of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the impact he has had on India, as well as other questions regarding a king who is reviled and worshiped in a mixed manner.

According to Victor Mallet of the Financial Times, Tharoor "want us to know the sources of the problems that confronted India" following India's independence. In the midst of post-Brexit discourses, a New Statesman essay said it was particularly relevant for readers in the United Kingdom. Tharoor has requested that the British government make "colonial reparations" to India.

In September 2019, he published The Hindu Way: An Introduction, in accordance with his study into Hindu culture and life of late. He wrote The New World Disorder And the Indian Imperative in 2020, co-authored with Samir Saran, President of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), one of Asia's most influential think tanks. The book is a critical review of the current state of international politics and introduces India's upcoming role as a non-hegemonic global power in formulating a new international order.

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Honours and awards

• 1976 – Rajika Kripalani Young Journalist Award for the Best Indian Journalist under 30.
• 1990 – Federation of Indian Publishers' Hindustan Times Literary Award for the Best Book of the Year for The Great Indian Novel.
• 1991 – Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book of the Year in the Eurasian Region, for The Great Indian Novel
• 1998 – Excelsior Award for excellence in literature, Association of Indians in America (AIA) and the Network of Indian Professionals (NetIP).
• 1998 – Global Leader of Tomorrow, World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
• 2004 – Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest honour for non-resident Indians (accepted 2007)
• 2009 – Zakir Hussain Memorial "Pride of India" Award.
• 2009 – Inspiration of the Year Award at GQ's Man of the Year Awards.
• 2009 – Hakim Khan Sur Award for National Integration, Maharana of Udaipur.
• 2010 – Sarva Deshiya Prathibha Award, Pazhassiraja Charitable Trust, Kozhikode.
• 2010 – "New Age Politician of the Year" Award, at NDTV's Indian of the Year awards.
• 2010 – Fifth IILM Distinguished Global Thinker Award, New Delhi.
• 2010 – Digital person of the year, Indian Digital Media Awards (IDMA), for popularising the digital medium in India.
• 2012 –  Spain : Commander of the Order of Charles III by King of Spain
• 2013 – First Sree Narayan Guru Global Secular and Peace Award at Thiruvananthapuram.
• 2013 – PETA's "Person of the Year".
• 2019 – Sahitya Akademi Award for his book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.
• 2022 -  France : Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, for his writings and speeches