Honestly speaking I do not find any utility in such questions. I do not know why such questions keep coming. What is the basis of such questions? Has anybody ever demanded that he be made the PM candidate? Quite often people talk about the G23 leaders of Congress who wrote an open letter to Sonia Gandhi. I believe Sonia Gandhi didn’t respond to it. Neither could they find a consensus leader among themselves. I would have loved it had they named Shashi Tharoor as their leader and wanted Tharoor to represent Congress. Since the G 23 leaders made a kind of revolt they were free to select their leader without worrying about the Gandhi family’s consent. But they couldn’t do so. they had a grand opportunity in front of them to select a leader within themselves and let the nation know whom they wanted to lead the Congress. Unfortunately, nothing happened. Nobody proposed Shashi Tharoor’s name. This means they also never found Tharoor worthy of leading the party.
Sashi Tharoor is not a mass-scale public leader with pan-India acceptability or appeal to become the PM candidate of his own might. He is not the leader who can get the party winner fighting against Modi. No doubt, he is a top-class intellectual and career diplomat with extraordinary command over English. But that alone can not be the criteria for becoming PM. In contrast, Modi has none of them. But Modi was CM for 13 years and PM for the last 10 years.
Quite often people say PVN Rao should have been allowed to head the Congress. But nobody considers the facts of why he could be removed from the Congress president’s post. Even after Rajiv Gandhi’s death Congress under Rao’s leadership couldn’t win a majority. It somehow managed to form a coalition government. In 1996 Congress under Rao’s presidency faced the biggest defeat till then, much worse than what Indira Gandhi faced in 1977. To make the matter worse for Rao, Congress could win only 22 seats in the 1996 general election Andhra, 3 down from 1991. An incumbent PM, a PM candidate, and a Cngress President have to show his might at least in his home state. Rao failed on all counts to hold the party in power as well as to hold his position in the party. He was too much hobnobbing with the BJP. His closeness with Godman Chandraswamy and Subramanian Swamy both suspected of their role in Rajiv’s murder made him unpopular within the Congress. Plus he himself was on the suspect list for repeatedly trying to limit the scope of the investigation and removing key files from the home ministry. Rao practically had no great mass political base to lead the party to election victory, not even in his home state. Congress already faced humiliating defeat in the 1994 Andhra assembly election winning only 26 seats, down from 181 seats in the previous election. TDP under NTR won 216 seats.
I believe nobody holds Tharoor to be a bigger leader than PVN Rao. Rao is by far the biggest national leader from the South. Shashi Tharoor unfortunately is not a political power horse who could change the fate of the party single-handedly or people will beeline after him. However, he can still be a PM candidate provided the opposition alliance chooses him as the consensus candidate, provided the Gandhi family and Congress choose him to be the face of the government - the way I K Gujral, Deve Gowda, and Dr. Manmohan Singh became PM.
Tharoor may be a competent candidate otherwise. But unfortunately, he doesn’t have the political mass to project himself as an undisputed leader in the party. Plus he is possibly not rated as docile enough to be elected as a consensus candidate. He doesn’t have enough buying from the alliance partners of the I.N.D.I.A. bock. Neither does he have a great rapport with alliance partners to draw support from them. I do not blame him entirely as he is comparatively new in Indian politics. He joined Indian politics only in 2009. However, in the last 15 years, he has made significant inroads and has occupied a space in people’s mindshare despite his party not being in power for the last 10 years. But this is not enough. He will need extensive backing from the Gandhi family to be nominated as the consensus candidate. Unfortunately, Tharoor represents a comparatively small state plus Congress is not in power there. Nor Tharoor has strong roots in his home state politics. So overall there is hardly any impetuous in his favour.
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