I want to apologize for the long silence in this space. I’d been traveling outside of India and had fallen behind on posting. I’m particularly sorry because there’s been so much to write about lately: the self-destruction of India’s main opposition political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the government’s new austerity drive, the severe drought in some parts of India, Chinese incursions into Indian territory, terrorism alerts, allegations that India’s 1998 nuclear test was “a dud” and India’s surprising success at the Davis Cup, just to name a few.

But today, as a way to ease back into things, I’d to post about one of those political controversies that could really only happen in India. Yes, that’s right, “Twittergate.” The case involves Shashi Tharoor, the uber-articulate and erudite former United Nations spokesman who was this past year persuaded to enter electoral politics, won a seat from Kerala on a Congress Party ticket, and is now serving as a junior minister of state for external affairs. Tharoor is a serious politician with many big, important thoughts: he wants to revamp how policy is conceived of within India’s Ministry of External Affairs, he wants to modernize India’s passport offices and he wants to elevate and expand the public discourse of foreign policy in India. But it is the fate of serious politicians in India that they are too often hobbled by a political culture that is completely unserious.

So it goes with Tharoor. Tharoor, you see, uses Twitter. No doubt, this is a bit of savvy self-marketing. (Tharoor, is after all, not just a highly-intelligent, modern politician of a type almost unknown in India; he is also a successful author, pundit and a leading light on the lecture circuit. In addition to Twitter, he also maintains a bilingual blog.) But many of Tharoor’s tweets were also very much in keeping with his stated goal of trying to broaden the foreign policy discussion in India. And Tharoor’s Twitter feed has proven very popular. Nearly 170,000 people subscribed to it (and that was before all the recent media attention) – more than follow the Twitter feeds of some Bollywood stars. It certainly makes Tharoor Twitter’s most popular Indian politician.

The long knives in the Congress Party were drawn, however, after Tharoor posted a humorous comment about the party’s new austerity drive on his Twitter feed. Party chief Sonia Gandhi had decreed that, given the drought in many parts of the country as well as India’s yawning fiscal deficit, the ruling party’s politicians should lead by example. She reportedly asked all Congress legislators to contribute 20 percent of their salaries to drought relief and to adopt a simple lifestyle so they could better empathize with their less fortunate constituents. Supposedly on her orders, Finance Minister and Sonia-sycophant Pranab Mukherjee asked two ministers to vacate the five star hotels in Delhi where they had been residing. One of those ministers was Tharoor – although it should be noted that Tharoor was paying all of his own expenses at the ritzy Taj Mahal Hotel on Man Singh Road. It was also requested that all Congress politicians stop flying business class. (We can discuss the shallow tokenism of this austerity drive in a later post.)

Any way, Tharoor dutifully vacated his hotel and moved into less glam quarters at a Navy guesthouse. But one of his Twitter fans sent him a message on the site asking if he intended to fly “cattle class” the next time he returned to his constituency in Kerala. “Absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows,” Tharoor tweeted back. The comment warranted a chuckle (I thought it was funny) – and okay, maybe a few raised eyebrows at the prospect of a government minister gently poking fun at his own party’s new initiative. But that’s about it.

This, however, is India. Here cows really are holy. And politicians are expected to slavishly follow the party line. So what ensued was an uproar in which Congress big-wigs lined up to express shock and dismay at Tharoor’s comments and discuss whether he should be driven from the ranks. Of course, everyone had to pretend they had never heard the term “cattle class” before and that they were actually offended – either for the economy-class travelers that Tharoor was allegedly comparing to cattle, or perhaps for the cows themselves, I’m not sure which. No one was willing to speak the truth: that what really offended these party men was not Tharoor’s use of a bovine metaphor, but the implied insubordination of his commenting on the policy shift at all. His crime was not elitism or classism, as some tried to insist, but insubordination.

No doubt those hurling bricks at Tharoor were feeling threatened by the upstart politician. They fail to see why Tharoor – just because he is a veteran diplomat with a distinguished career behind him, a charismatic speaker and a serious intellect – should be elevated to a position of power. This is India after all, where substantive achievement means nothing in politics; one should only be judged on political pedigree and party loyalty. No, to them Tharoor is merely a freshman MP and Congress newbie who ought to be put in his place. (Predictably, Tharoor is only more popular than ever with the general public following this controversy over his Twitter post; his Twitter following in particular has grown rapidly in the past week.)

To his credit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – a wise man who no doubt sees the value of having a person of Tharoor’s caliber in government — realized the ridiculousness of this non-scandal and sought to cut off its oxygen supply by ending speculation that Tharoor would be sacked. He said that he took Tharoor’s comments simply as a joke. (No word on what thin-skinned Sonia Gandhi thinks.) But the fact that “Twittergate” (as some here have dubbed it) made news for days is no laughing matter. In a country facing the extreme challenges of India – from grinding poverty to endemic political corruption – it is a reason to weep.

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