Diplomacy has an integrity missing in politics: Shashi Tharoor

Congress Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor held the participants of the Kochi Institute spellbound with his special brand of wit, charm, humour, his flawless English and faultless diction. Answering a volley of questions from past RI director A S Venkatesh, also known for his quick wit and repartee skills, the diplomat-turned-politician good naturedly and graciously accepted a couple of cheeky comments on his penchant for using “seven-syllable words”, diplomacy, politics and a brief stint as a stand-up comedian.

Institute Convenor RI Director Anirudha Roychowdhury honouring Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor as (from L)
PRID A S Venkatesh, RI Director Raju Subramanian, Institute Chair PDG John Daniel and Vidhya Subramanian look on.

But despite the camaraderie and the laughs raised at the session, ­Tharoor left the audience with a couple of scary messages, one being how we are living in a much more troubled world than we appreciate.

Asked to comment on his switching to the world of politics after spending nearly 30 years as a ­diplomat at the United Nations where he almost became the secretary general, and to compare the two vocations, ­Tharoor said: “There’s no real comparison; they’re two completely dissimilar professions, and there’s a certain amount of dissimulation in both. The first and only point in common is that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say.”

Also, in diplomacy, there are certain standards of conduct, “a certain level of, shall we say very bluntly, integrity that is often missing in our politics. And at the same time, there is a desire to please, which should be, and is sometimes, there in politics. But that desire to please is always deceptively worn around the mask of civility and politeness and courtesy. I’ve often joked that a diplomat is somebody who can tell you to go to hell and make you look forward to the trip!”

You have to second-guess yourself a lot in politics to ensure that anything you say, in all innocence and sincerity, may not be twisted to damage you politically.

Coming to Indian politics, the MP said here there were challenges which are “very different from those of other democracies. First of all, we have a parliamentary system, which is in many ways grossly unsuited to our culture and our people’s conduct and expectations. Our people vote for individuals rather than ideologies or parties.”

The second challenge was that “the politicians themselves, for the largest part, seem to be rather bereft of ideology or conviction. They are there because they see many of these parties as vehicles to come to power, and that’s essentially what they’re interested in. These challenges are specifically unique to us.”

Another bane of Indian politics was “the absurdly low spending limits on elections, which are violated routinely so that every elected parliamentarian begins with a lie about his expense accounts.” But while these were the unattractive features of our political system, “in a democracy, what better way is there to make a difference to your people? Where you can go out and seek their approval for what you stand for, appeal to them, provide enough services, and then ask them to keep sending you back to your responsibilities.”

Tharoor said he ended up from diplomacy to politics since “the one goal I had in life, whether at the UN, my writing or in politics, has been to try and make a difference for people, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor and PRID Venkatesh.

To the question on what he had to “unlearn” to manage the switch from diplomacy to politics, Tharoor said, “In diplomacy, when one chose one’s words, one was reasonably sure that the person one was talking to would understand what you meant or were trying to convey. In politics, the lesson I learnt very quickly in my first few months was the truth of ­Shakespeare’s old line that the ‘­success of a jest lies not in the tongue of the teller, but in the ear of the hearer.’ It almost doesn’t matter what you intend to convey, all that matters in politics is what people believe they heard, or are meant to believe they heard. And therefore, you have to actually second-guess yourself a lot in politics to ensure that anything you say, in all innocence and sincerity, may not be twisted to damage you politically.”

He had learnt this bitter lesson during his first year in politics while accompanying the then PM Manmohan Singh to Saudi Arabia as a minister. In an interview, he had described Saudi Arabia as a “valuable interlocutor, which is standard UN diplomatic language for the person who is speaking directly. That’s all I meant. But the media maliciously twisted that comment to say I was making Saudi Arabia an intermediary.” This controversy completely overshadowed the PM’s visit. In politics and a world filled with multilingual countries, “people can say things that make sense in one language and sound awful in translation.”

We live in a far more troubled world than we imagine, and there is every risk that 2025 will be a little too much for the world.

On the relevance of the UN in today’s world, Tharoor said if looked purely from the viewpoint of the UN’s ability to maintain peace and security around the world, “clearly the very persistence of the Russian-Ukraine war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make the UN look helpless and impotent. But if you look at the UN from the broader lens of all that it does in the world, it’s making an enormous difference in setting the agenda on many important issues that came to the fore through UN conferences.” Global debates on the environment and climate change are a crucial example, as are historic issues such as decolonisation and the anti-apartheid.

He’d say the UN had “shaped the world the way it is today on many issues. But if you look at it purely in terms of can it stop every war, no, it can’t, but it has been a useful forum to prevent World War III.”

After WW II, world leaders set up the UN to ensure that the countries that could go into war had “a common place to meet. The UN is very unusual in that it is both a stage and an actor; a stage where world leaders and governments can meet to discuss issues, sort out their differences and reach an agreement. And then when they have agreed on something, it is an actor in the form of the secretary general, his agencies, and so on.” But people tend to confuse the two roles, he said.

I’m comfortable enough with Malayalam to win four elections. Though Sahitya Malayalam is a stranger to me!

When PRID Venkatesh reminded him about Rotary’s role in the UN charter in 1945, Tharoor reiterated Rotary’s closeness to the UN, and recalled that while at the UN, he had facilitated so many Rotary conferences on UN premises, for which Rotary had made him a life member.

On the question of India being denied a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, Tharoor agreed that the Council’s “composition reflects the geopolitical realities of 1945, certainly not of 2025.” He then delved into the difficulties and intricacies in reforming the UN charter. In essence, “you need a formula simultaneously acceptable to two-thirds of the world and not unacceptable to the five permanent members… a very, very tall order!”

Apart from India, which had 17 per cent of the world’s population, other claimants for a permanent seat are “Japan and Germany, the second and third largest financial contributors to the UN after the US.” Others included Brazil and South Africa, which are immense in their sub-regions, and so on.

Tharoor then walked the audience through the intricate ways in which the powerful nations of the world have a say in the UN, and alternative bodies such as G20, BRICS, etc which had emerged, but none of these could “claim the merit of being a totally universal body” or having a substantial say in maintaining peace and security in the world. “Therefore it is in the interest of everybody to make sure the UN remains viable.”

Asked about NATO, he said this was a military alliance and had become the excuse for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had later driven “two neutral countries, Sweden and Finland, into arms of NATO,” to invade Ukraine.

Tharoor said given the situation in Syria where President Assad’s 24-year-rule was about to be replaced (when he was addressing the meet) by a very strong Islamist group, the tensions between China and Taiwan, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Gaza, “we are today living in a world which is in a very, very troubled state, much more than we fully appreciate. We inevitably tend to be focused on our own problems and our own immediate neighbourhood, but there is every risk that 2025 will be a little too much for the world.”

 

Pictures by Rasheeda Bhagat

 

 

 

Tharoor-speak on various issues

Changing India to Bharat

The argument to do so is so absurd that it is laughable because let’s look at the notion of the word India and where does it come from. When the Persians spoke of people beyond the Indus, they didn’t have the letter ‘s’ in their language so they called people beyond the Sindhu, the Hindus. And when the Greeks came, they learned of this place from the Persians and they called it India. Now this is 300 BC, so we’ve been known as India by the Persians and the Greek and the Romans for about 2300 years. So how can the same people who reject ‘India’, go around saying garv se kaho hum Hindu hei? Hindu and India come from the same origin.

Maulana Azad has written that the people who went to Mecca —
whether the Pashtoons from today’s Pakistan or the Tamils from South India — would be called ­Hindis as they were all from Hind.

 

Playing the role of a standup comedian

I am occasionally game for taking a gamble like that. I don’t gamble with money but I do gamble with my reputation. In 2019, when Amazon Prime did a session with ‘celebrities’ on stand-up comedy, they wanted one politician and turned to me. I was amused by the idea and as the filming was scheduled between the casting of votes and counting for the 2019 general elections, it was a period of irresponsibility when you don’t know whether you’re coming back into Parliament or not. So I did it and it went rather well. Though a lot of my political jokes on the then government, which got re-elected, got deleted. Amazon Prime, in its wisdom, edited those out!

 

Adapting quickly to technology

I was better when I was younger;
I was one of the first to use a video camera. When the Internet era began, I was in the US and caught on to technology early, and took to the phone for my emails and so on. But with age and advancing seniority, I lost the enthusiasm to keep up with every new trending technology. I got on Twitter urged by a young aide and my son; though it caused some trouble too in my first untroubled career. The media resented it because Twitter was a way to bypass them. When I became the first Indian minister in decades to visit Liberia, nobody in India even reported it. People learnt about it from my tweets. But it created hostility and controversy. But social media consumes so much time; I get 1,000 messages a day on WhatsApp. How the heck does one keep up?

 

On writing over 25 books

An era of darkness came about when my publisher called me after my Oxford speech in 2015. In the first 24 hours, three million people had downloaded it and he said you have to turn this into a book. And I said don’t be silly everyone knows this stuff and he said ‘you don’t be silly. If everyone knows it, why did it go viral?’ For the first time I engaged researchers, because I wanted to be on solid ground with facts. I took thousands of pages of research material on a drive to the hills of Bhutan… luckily the Indian sim card didn’t work in Bhutan those days so no one could reach me.
I worked 18-hour days (for 12 days) distilling the info and the first draft was done.

On getting ideas for his books

Since I am a columnist, from my columns ideas for books emerge. A request to write a book on foreign policy as I was conceived to be an international figure, gave me the idea of writing on India’s foreign policy for Indian readers (Pax Indica: India and the World in the Twenty-first Century), and it has done extremely well. I’m told that even 12 years after it was published, UPSC aspirants are still reading and studying it. My most recent book The land of words is a direct result of a column for Khaleej Times, which had asked me to write a weekly column. I did it for two and a half years and was able to expand it into a book. It depends on what material is there. There are things that I would like to write that I’m not writing at all, and above all, in that list comes fiction. Of my first five books, four were fiction. And then I had to give that up because of my life in politics.

 

Why he hasn’t written more fiction

Fiction requires not just time, which is scarce enough for a busy man, but also a space inside your head to create an alternative universe, to populate it with characters, episodes, dialogues, concerns that are as real to you as those you’re encountering in real life. So you’ve got to build a sort of glass palace in which your story is enclosed and visit it every day. You are not able to, as you’re constantly interrupted by the real world. That palace will start developing cracks, and if the interruptions are too frequent and too long, the entire glass palace will crumble and crash upon you.

In the first decade of the 21st century, my laptop was littered with the beginnings of at least three or four novels… five pages for one and almost 100 for another. But I could never get it to stride because each of them was interrupted by the realities of my work. I finally realised that I’m better off writing non-fiction because non-fiction is interruptible. Going back to what you’ve written, even if you interrupted it for six weeks of campaigning in an election, you can just reread what you’ve written, pick up the thread and keep writing. About my fiction I always joke that one day the voters might return me to the world of literature!

 

Malayalam: Well, I’m comfortable enough in it to win four elections. Though I will admit that Sahitya Malayalam is a stranger to me.
I have very colloquial, orally learnt Malayalam because I was not educated in Kerala. I was born in ­London, brought up in Mumbai, went to high school in Calcutta, college in Delhi and a life in ­multiple countries around the world, and then back to India in a pan-­India kind of way. But I have read a lot of ­Kerala literature in English translation. So my Malayalam is fluent, comprehensible, but far from being as sophisticated as I would have liked it to be.

 

Advise to Rotarians: I am a huge admirer of everything you do. Service before self is a terrific motto. You’re all successful in your fields and yet you’ve chosen to share the benefits of that success with the less fortunate.

 

Favourites: My favourite food is idli and the honest answer to holiday destination is Thiuvananthapuram. A day without agenda? Cricket, but Test match! ODI is like reading a short story; but Test match is novel.

 

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