SO, if India's aggressive media is to be believed, Shashi Tharoor's foot-in-mouth disease has shown up all over again.
India's minister of state for external affairs, Shashi Tharoor, is in the news again. ST PHOTO: Joseph Nair
India's minister of state for external affairs, by mentioning Saudi Arabia as a "valuable interlocutor" on India's testy relationship with Pakistan, is being blamed for suggesting that the oil-rich Islamic kingdom has been invited to be a mediator in the Sub-continent's longest running dispute.
This, according to the self-styled guardians of Indian foreign policy, runs counter to New Delhi's longstanding position.
Dr Tharoor has had to clarify his remarks and once again, the media has seen a sitting duck and is unloading barrels of buckshot on the first-term MP and minister.
Poor Tharoor.
And just when we thought he had learnt his lesson from last year's fiasco; when he Tweeted about the government's austerity measures forcing him to "fly cattle class" so as to propitiate "our holy cows". He nearly lost his job at the time. Surviving by the skin of his teeth only because of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's resolute backing. Dr Singh, who is approaching 80, suggested at the time that India should learn to lighten up.
What was so wrong in calling the Saudis useful interlocutors?
As Prime Minister Singh's post-visit remarks to Saudi Arabia showed so clearly, Pakistan was, indeed, discussed in Riyadh. Clearly, Singh has asked King Abdullah to use his influence in Islamabad to get them to listen more closely to New Delhi's concerns about the terror attacks against India that are often planned from its soil.
So, Tharoor wasn't wrong. He was merely being frank. What then is the problem? To understand why Tharoor raises so much dust you have to study his background.
He is a high achiever from a middle class family whose roots are in Kerala. Educated in Mumbai and Kolkata, and at New Delhi's prestigious St. Stephen's College, he had a solid record in both academics and extra curricular activity such as debating. After getting a PhD from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University at an incredibly young age, he succeeded in entering the UN, a career he had dreamed of while most of his peers aimed no higher than entering the civil service in India.
As a student in New Delhi, Tharoor's highest ambition was to be the UN Secretary General. As he worked his way up the UN system, rising to the post of Under Secretary General under Koifi Annan, he was even more convinced that this was within his grasp.
And so, even though his chances were hopeless — the US had made it clear it wanted Ban Ki Moon and the UN's top man has never come from states such as India — Tharoor convinced PM Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi that he had a fighting chance.
This enraged the Indian Foreign Service, which was compelled to expend valuable international goodwill in a fight it had no chance of winning.
Predictably, Tharoor lost and although he came second in the first and second round of balloting for the post, that really was little comfort.
It was a loss of face that India could have avoided. But Tharoor's good looks, charm, erudition and oratory helped prevent a closer examination of that fiasco.
His problems started when he decided to parlay his enhanced public profile in India into a political career at home.
PM Singh gave him a ticket to stand from Trivandrum, capital of Kerala, his home state. Instantly, he went up against entrenched Congress party interests. Local Congress-wallahs refused to back him and only a visit by Mrs Gandhi made them show some interest in Tharoor's campaign.
The man with the "St Stephen's accent", as he calls it, won by a landslide. What's more, PM Singh gave him a ministerial berth, unusual for a first-term MP.
That's when the resentment began to boil over. The old boy herd of Congress elephants frowned at this interloper on their turf. In the media, some felt he had used — and discarded — them at will. Others thought his manners were a little too posh.
A perfect storm was created around Tharoor when made those remarks about flying cattle class. Some Congress windbags suggested he had insulted the ordinary people who vote for the party; others that the holy cow remark was targeted at Mrs Gandhi herself.
While it was silly of someone so intelligent to have offered himself up as such an easy target, Tharoor's qualities are hard to beat.
Despite a hectic career in diplomacy, he has written several books. Two of them, a small work on Nehru, and a semi-autobiographical book called India: Midnight to the Millennium, are great reads and his love for country shines through. I must have gifted a dozen copies of Midnight to various people.
Although he could be said to have entered politics with a silver spoon, it was courageous on his part to have chosen to go in for the rough and tumble of a full fledged campaign, especially when the PM himself is a man who entered parliament through the upper house, which has an indirect ballot. Tharoor too could easily have asked for similar accommodation, pleading no experience in politics. But he chose to do it the hard way and no one can take that away from him.
During the campaign last year, I watched in amazement as this city slicker from New York donned the wraparound dhoti and shirt common in Kerala and shed the Malayalam accent he learnt on his mother's knee to speak the way of his potential constituents in Trivandrum.
When I saw the shiny eyes with which women, young and old looked at him — Kerala is the only state in India where the population balance favours the female gender — I knew his chances were improving by the day.
Once in power, he could have basked in his Lodhi Estate home in New Delhi, walking with his security escorts to his favourite bookshops in Khan Market. Instead, he has set himself a gruelling pace, travelling to Africa and the Middle East — areas he is responsible for — yet, keeping in touch with Trivandrum and his home state.
His twitter fan list reportedly has passed 650,000 which probably makes him more popular on that social networking site than Bollywood's reigning hero, Shah Rukh Khan.
And by occasionally thumbing his nose at the humbug that surrounds him, he has also shown that he isn't entirely beholden to his political patrons and may well be developing a constituency of his own.
That could mean only one thing.
As I saw from the days when he was in the thick of the fight against Ban Ki Moon, Tharoor is a man who always works on Plan B, even as he gives Plan A his best shot.