Shashi Tharoor
- Political Affiliation:
- Indian National Congress
- Notable Works:
- “The Great Indian Novel”
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Shashi Tharoor (born March 9, 1956, London, England) is a prominent Indian diplomat and politician who, after a distinguished career at the United Nations, became a minister twice, from 2009 to 2010 and again from 2012 to 2014, in the Government of India. He is also a highly regarded author of nonfiction and fiction books.
Early life and education
Tharoor was born into a London-based Indian expatriate family, which returned to India after his birth. He received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Delhi in New Delhi, and in 1978, at age 22, he received a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. At that time Tharoor was the youngest person to earn a doctorate from the Fletcher School.
Career in the United Nations
Tharoor became a staff member in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva in 1978. For nearly the next 30 years he served as a diplomat in the United Nations (UN) in various capacities, including head of the Singapore UNHCR office (1981–84), director of communications and special projects in the office of the secretary-general (1998–2001), and under-secretary-general for communications and public information (2002–07).
In 2006 India nominated Tharoor for the post of secretary-general of the UN. He finished second out of the seven candidates in the election conducted to choose the secretary-general, which was won by former South Korean diplomat and politician Ban Ki-Moon. Following his defeat, Tharoor resigned from the UN in 2007 and became the chairman of Afras Ventures, a Dubai-based company.
Political career and controversies
In 2009 Tharoor joined the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). In May of that year he contested and won the elections to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian Parliament) from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Shortly after the election, he was appointed the union minister of state (a subcabinet-level position) in the Ministry of External Affairs in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
His tenure in office lasted less than a year. One of the reasons for this was his indiscreet use of the social media platform Twitter (now X). His posts generated a series of controversies, including one in which he was alleged to have ridiculed the economic austerity measures of the UPA government. He was also accused of having a vested interest—one that allegedly resulted in Sunanda Pushkar, his future wife, benefiting monetarily—in the now-disbanded Kochi Tuskers Kerala, a cricket team that played in the Indian Premier League (IPL; an annual Twenty20 cricket league organized in India). He resigned from the ministry in April 2010.
Tharoor subsequently remained active in the Lok Sabha, serving on committees focused on foreign affairs and defense. In October 2012 Tharoor was appointed union minister of state in the Ministry of Human Resource Development (now called Ministry of Education). He continued to court controversy in his second ministerial stint, notably by criticizing the contemporary Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi. He retained his seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections but stepped down from his ministry post when the UPA government was ousted from power by the victorious BJP in the parliamentary polling. He was reelected to the Lok Sabha in the polls of 2019 and 2024.
In January 2014 Tharoor’s third wife, Sunanda Pushkar, was found dead in a New Delhi hotel room shortly after accusing him of having an affair. Although the cause of death was determined to be a drug overdose, an autopsy revealed various injuries on her body. A lengthy police investigation resulted in Tharoor being charged in 2018 with marital cruelty and abetting Pushkar’s suicide. The charges were dismissed in 2021.
Publications and awards
- 1990: Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Europe and South Asia) for best book for The Great Indian Novel (1989)
- 2004: Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (India’s highest award for a nonresident Indian, a person of Indian origin, or an organization founded and run by them), Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India
- 2019: Sahitya Akademi Award for An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016)
- 2022: Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (“Knight of the Legion of Honour”; a prestigious civilian honor conferred by France)
Tharoor is renowned for his eloquence and rhetorical prowess. His linguistic flair has entered Indian popular culture by way of his posts on X, which often feature such recondite words as floccinaucinihilipilification (“the act of evaluating something as valueless”) and quomodocunquize (“to generate income through any available means”).
Tharoor is a prolific author, and his most-notable nonfiction books include Reasons of State: Political Development and India’s Foreign Policy Under Indira Gandhi, 1966–1977 (1982), India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003), Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012), and An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016). Among his works of fiction are The Great Indian Novel (1989), Show Business (1991), which was adapted for the screen as Bollywood (1994), and Riot (2001).