GANDHIS NEED CONTRARIANS, NOT CONFORMISTS

ROYALTY doesn't like to be outshined. When Louis VIII, the Sun King of France who built Versailles, visited the magnificent mansion of his finance minister, Marquis Nicolas Fouquet, he was incensed that a courtier should own a palace grander than the king's. Fouquet was immensely popular in court and with the people, which angered the monarch. Louis decided that the minister had stolen money from the treasury, and soon Fouquet found himself in jail and his property confiscated by Louis. There is a lesson in this for Shashi Tharoor, the urbane Congress MP who, by omission, looted the party's treasury, whose sole wealth is the Gandhi political currency.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

Genetics and leadership aren't credible companions. The Congress myth that genes play a complementary role in the making of its leader has demolished numerous leaders with pedigree. The delusion is that a Gandhi alone can bring Acche Din to the party's rained-out fortunes.

As a result, no new winnable Congress leaders who can also get others to win elections have emerged. As the winning capacity of the Gandhis wanes, its hypersycophantic megaphones are out in force to silence anyone who seems to threaten their mascots' fading charisma. For the past few weeks, the encyclopedic Tharoor has been the target of the wrath of the Congress. The 66-year-old MP is being ostracised for contesting against 80-year-old Mallikarjun Kharge. Tharoor's unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Gandhis is garnering over 1,000 votes out of 9,000plus polled, which no other rebel candidate has ever got in Congress history.

Rhodes scholar Tharoor, a historian by education, a diplomat by profession and an intellectual by predilection, who has authored over two dozen books, is a hardcore Nehruvian in action and ideology.