Thiruvananthapuram: Shashi Tharoor, member of Congress Working Committee and three-time member of the Lok Sabha, who has for quite some time been distancing himself from the Kerala unit of Indian National Congress, has appeared at a party platform after an interval.
Tharoor made his presence visible at the concluding session of the Mahila Sahas Kerala led by Jeby Mather MP which was attended also by the Congress’ Opposition leader VD Satheesan, KPCC President Sunny Joseph and senior leader Adoor Prakash.
It was while Tharoor was speaking that Satheesan entered the stage who lost no time in patting on Tharoor’s back and the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha member lost no time in reciprocating with a ‘Hello’ and shook hands with him. The two leaders also took care to lift their hands for everyone in the audience to see their handshake as if with a message that things were not as bad as they thought.
Tharoor also embraced Adoor Prakash, making a pause in his speech. All were hard to miss signs of a melting of the ice between Shashi Tharoor and the state party unit.
It is learnt that Tharoor attended the program at the invitation of the AICC General Secretary in charge of Kerala. He was at the receiving end of an implicit boycott call from the Congress following several incidents in which he put the party on the defensive. It started with his repeated praise of prime minister Modi including one on the polling day in by-election of Nilambur constituency.
Then came an article in which Tharoor criticised the Emergency which showed members of the Nehru-Gandhi family in bad light. When such deviations from the party line looked going out of limits, the party was constrained to keep Tharoor at bay.
At one point senior Congress leader K Muraleedharan had even said that Tharoor would not be invited to party functions in Thiruvananthapuram, in spite of his being the MP from the capital.
However, Tharoor did attend meetings convened by Rahul Gandhi including the one on the Vice Presidential election. And his attendance at the Thiruvananthapuram event is the latest in that series marking a patch-up relations between the man and the party.