Congress To Send Notice To Shashi Tharoor For 'Praising' PM Modi

Tharoor and his colleague Abishek Singhvi had last week supported party leader Jairam Ramesh who has said that not recognising Modi's work and "demonising" him all the time was not going to help.

Shashi Tharoor

Thiruvananthapuram: Senior Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor will be served a notice by the party for his statements praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi, IANS reported on Tuesday. Tharoor and his colleague Abishek Singhvi had last week supported party leader Jairam Ramesh who has said that not recognising Modi's work and "demonising" him all the time was not going to help. "At the moment Shashi is travelling abroad and once he returns, we will give him a notice on his statements. The reply that he gives will be forwarded to the All India Congress Committee and they will make the final call," Mullapally Ramachandran, state chief of the Congress in Kerala, said. Tharoor on his part on Sunday defended the remarks made by him, Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh. "What Jairam Ramesh and Singhvi have said is not wrong. If Modi has done something good, we should acknowledge it. Otherwise we will lose credibility among the people. If there is need, we should severely criticise him," he told a Malayalam TV channel. Former union minister Jairam Ramesh had recently said Modi's model was not a "complete negative story" and not recognising his work and demonising him all the time is not going to help. "It is time we recognise Modi's work and what he did between 2014 and 2019 due to which he was voted back to power by over "30 per cent of the electorate",  he had said on Wednesday. Tharoor has not always been in the good books of many state party leaders right from 2009 when as a rank outsider he was fielded by the Congress in the Lok Sabha election and won by nearly 1 lakh votes and has retained the seat since then. In 2014, Tharoor won the seat by 15,000 votes and in 2019 by 99,989 votes. He had termed the 2014 vote as his toughest election as his wife Sunanda Pushkar had been found dead in a posh Delhi hotel in January that year. (with inputs from agencies)