Shashi Tharoor is a winning lottery ticket India's Congress wants to lose

Imagine you are holding a lottery ticket. Imagine again that you stand a good chance of winning the lottery.

But when it comes to reality, you don’t want to win – and you are more intent on throwing away that ticket.

That’s the situation the Indian National Congress finds itself in when it comes to Shashi Tharoor, its MP from Kerala and with whom the party’s been having a public airing of different views.

Best suited to lead the UDF in Kerala?

For quite some time now, Tharoor has had the best set of credentials to lead the Congress-led UDF to a victory in the May 2026 Kerala Assembly elections. He has won that right by putting out views that do resonate with Kerala voters. (He hasn’t just won four consecutive elections to the Indian Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram just because he looks the part or for the way he handles the English language…)  

But the Congress party doesn’t want to have anything to do with a Tharoor-led or Tharoor-driven UDF win in 2026. The way they are going about it, the less the Congress wants to hear anything about or from Tharoor, they better.

Now, the same is being played out at the pan-India level. The Indian government wants Tharoor to lead an all-party delegation of MPs to head out to the world and give the country’s version of what led to ‘Operation Sindoor’ and its aftermath.

Tharoor is amply qualified to take on the task. Even a second’s glance of his CV will attest to that. There’s that long stint at the United Nations, which itself should be more than enough to convince Tharoor’s worst enemies that the guy knows his diplomatic stuff.

Congress ignores the 'Tharoor vibe'

Unfortunately, the one place where that sense of ‘Tharoor is good’ vibe is missing is within his political party – the Indian National Congress.

The party has put forward an alternate set of names, where apart from Anand Sharma, the other three are not exactly well-versed in statecraft. This is downright ridiculous. (There is no place even for Manish Tiwari, another Congress stalwart who has articulated his views with precision and panache.)  

Just think through it – you have a foreign policy expert in the party who has been tasked with leading a team that would spell out India’s version of seismic events. It’s like having a nuclear scientist in the ranks and all he’s being assigned to do is the lab clean up.  

Yes, the BJP will look to score points and cause a rift within its main opponent, the Congress. That’s what political parties are expected to do.

But in this case, there is a clear bigger picture. India needs to send a message out – and Tharoor is the best candidate to deliver this. The Modi government has done well to choose beyond its own ranks to come up with the ‘politician-diplomats’ to oversee the project, including DMK leader Kanimozhi Karunanidhi and NCP’s Supriya Sule.

This is a time to be thinking beyond politics. Even when politics seeps into every decision taken.

But the Congress has got it awfully wrong by not naming Tharoor – it’s the one lottery ticket the party cannot afford to lose…