Tharoor winds up Malabar tour leaving fault lines in Congress open

Kozhikode

Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor wound up his Malabar tour on Wednesday in Kannur and returned to Thiruvananthapuram, once again bringing to the fore the fault lines within the party.

In the course of the tour from November 20 to 23, Mr. Tharoor met cultural leaders like M.T. Vasudevan Nair, M.G.S. Narayanan and T. Padmanabhan; religious and community heads like Bishop of the Thamarassery Diocese Remigiose Inchananiyil, Thalassery Archbishop Mar Joseph Pamplani, and Sunni leader Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar; interacted with lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, and college students, in Kannur and Kozhikode.

The main organiser was none other than M.K. Raghavan, Kozhikode MP, who was among the few senior leaders who supported Mr. Tharoor’s bid for the post of All-India Congress Committee president recently.

He also held discussions with leaders of the Indian Union Muslim League, a major constituent of the Congress-led United Democratic Front, at Panakkad in Malappuram.

Obviously, a section of senior leaders in the State saw these overtures with an eye of suspicion, leading to the Kozhikode district unit of the Youth Congress backtracking from an event scheduled in Kozhikode on November 20 following instructions from the district leadership.

A series of statements and counter-statements followed with leaders like as KPCC president K. Sudhakaran, Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan, K. Muraleedharan, MP, and a host of others expressing their views in public.

While some were in support of Mr. Tharoor, some others found no fault with him. Mr. Muraleedharan went to the extent of blaming leaders with “Chief Ministerial ambitions” behind an undeclared ban on events attended by the Thiruvananthapuram MP.