The liberal rebels Cong can't tame

Time of India

24-05-2025

Marx warned history repeats as farce. The Congress is proving him right
History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce,' said Karl Marx on the 1851 coup that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Over a century and a half later, the Indian National Congress is striving to live up to the spirit of that quote.
Its puerile reactions to the liberal views of writer-politician Shashi Tharoor on the India-Pakistan conflict exposed the farcical traits that have long plagued the party. True, Congress once silenced liberal voices like Chettur Sankaran Nair when M K Gandhi stirred up euphoria in the freedom movement. But today, the party's leadership is struggling to prevent BJP from appropriating both Nair and Tharoor, in one swift move.
The parallels between Nair and Tharoor are striking. In 1897, Nair became the only Malayali to be unanimously elected Congress president, while Tharoor remains the only Malayali to unsuccessfully challenge the high command's nominee for the party presidency. Both men dared to challenge their party's positions when they thought national interest was at stake.
Perhaps Tharoor may not match the towering stature that Nair commanded during his heyday—not just in India but across the British Empire. Born in 1857 into the matrilineal Chettur family in Mankara, Palakkad, Nair dominated Indian public life for almost half a century until his death in 1934.
Mankara lies just a few kilometres away from Tarur, where Tharoor's ancestral home stands.
Like Tharoor, Nair was not a career politician. He served as the 13th Congress president, much before Gandhi and Nehru emerged on the scene. He was the first Indian to head a department (education) as a member of the viceroy's executive council l—the highest office an Indian could hold under British rule.
He resigned from that post in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, instantly becoming a nationalist hero. Nair, who started associating with Congress in its formative stages, was one of the staunch constitutionalists who wanted freedom to be passed to Indian hands through the gradual democratic empowerment of institutions.
At times, he did upset other nationalists by accepting assignments and plum posts in the imperial govt. It was this same rebellious spirit, not his liberal ideology, that recently led Prime Minister Narendra Modi to invoke his memories causing much embarrassment to Congress leadership.
If Tharoor hit headlines when he demanded reparations from England for colonial exploitation and wrote a book on the subject, in his 1897 presidential address at the Amaravati session of Congress, at the age of 40, Nair held Britain morally responsible for the extreme poverty in India and its failure to cope with the unprecedented natural calamities of that year.
As Congress started drifting from liberal ideals and constitutional values, Nair moved away from active politics and continued his work—persuading and criticising the British govt and pushing for democratic reforms. Like Tharoor, Nair also proved that political differences with govt need not deter a nationalist and true liberal from engaging with it when necessary.
But it was his book, 'Gandhi and Anarchy,' written after the Moplah Rebellion in Malabar following Gandhi's regrettable decision to yoke together the non-cooperation movement with the religious Khilafat cause, that rendered Sankaran Nair hugely unpopular.
Nair, who had first-hand access to the chilling govt records on the reign of terror unleashed against the Hindu population during the 1921 rebellion, said Gandhi's non-cooperation movement would sow the seeds of anarchy in Indian society and his experiment to attract Muslims to the freedom struggle by declaring Khilafat as a common cause of the country would further widen the Hindu-Muslim divide. Such raw criticism was too much for the Congress to accept for multiple reasons.
The Congress functionaries attempting to prevent BJP from hijacking Nair's legacy may be ignorant about the circumstances that prompted Nair to allegedly gravitate towards the Hindu Mahasabha during the last phase of his public life.
To truly claim his legacy, Congress will have to start appreciating the liberal values he championed. Only then will it understand why Tharoor has no qualms in labelling Hamas a terror organisation or saying that he prioritizes patriotism over petty politics.
The lessons are just as relevant for BJP as both Nair and Tharoor stood for scientific temperament and never promoted bigotry. Both surprised their friends and foes alike in their issue-based approach to situations.
'Sankaran Nair was a liberal voice to the core, and so is Tharoor. It can only be so for erudite souls,' said political scientist G Gopakumar, adding that his long innings in the United States as a UN representative must have further nurtured Tharoor's liberal spirit. 'Instead of cringing over Tharoor's smart work, Congress leadership should have welcomed it,' he said.
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