Last weekend, Shashi Tharoor would have been surprised to find someone offering him a middle class escape from Republic TV’s barrage of insinuations related to his late wife Sunanda Pushkar’s death. In a piece for The Telegraph, his lit fest co-enthusiast and fellow Stephanian, Mukul Kesavan has attributed to Tharoor the perfections and appeal of a middle class desi paragon. He was also referred to as the embodiment of  Nehru’s ideological legacy.

Somehow hiding his surprise, Tharoor was impressed enough to tweet his admiration for the defence.

It is profitable to grab the middle class label in a country when you are fighting battles of perception. It helps in swinging the game in the media space, where opinion-makers and consumers are primarily from middle class India.

Tharoor could qualify for the middle class with a mathematical variant of it. While a large number of Indians would like to describe themselves as middle class, data suggests that many of them, including many reading this article, are more likely to figure in the top 10 or even five per cent of the income level. Such global surveys, as one done by Pew Research Centre, narrows down middle income class even further. So only a few can claim to belong to that group. But, to say someone is middle class isn’t just an economic statement in India. It’s a complex mix of everyday middle class reality which is difficult to relate with Tharoor.

The problem with Kesavan’s description of Tharoor’s career achievements as an embodiment of “middle class success” is that it is incorrect. Tharoor was born in London at a time when, in its formative years after Independence, India was in awe of foreign travel, let alone being born abroad. His father was the leading print advertisement professional of his time, spearheading marketing space for The Statesman when the newspaper was at the peak of its powers. Tharoor had privileged schooling at Campion School in what was then Bombay and St Xavier’s in what was then Calcutta before doing well enough in academics to enter that hallowed site of elitism in India of the 1970s – St Stephen’s College in Delhi.

His subsequent march towards academic distinction at Tufts University in the United States Of America followed by joining the United Nations, is the type of career trajectory which some may find remarkable-  but it’s not the stuff of despite-middle-class-origins story. Some wannabe international civil servants may find in his journey a smooth career graph, but there is no way in which the middle class will identify with him for its struggles while negotiating everyday life in India.

Kesavan may remember how in 2009, his fellow Congressman, again a Stephenian and co-claimant of the Nehruvian legacy, Mani Shankar Aiyar had famously slammed the UN diplomat’s “cattle class” gaffe on Twitter as elitist. One may revisit the article that Aiyar wrote for Outlook. With the tone of a college senior talking to a sophomore, he chided Tharoor for a rather naïve and callous understanding of the world outside St Stephen’s college while peddling humour on Twitter. With his party also taking exception to the comment, Tharoor had to apologise.

The reason Indians rooted for him to win the race to UN Secretary General’s post in 2006 couldn’t be found in what he meant for “middle class” dreams. It was to be found in something Kesavan has sceptically put under single inverted commas – nationalist sentiments. It’s the same impulse which drives Indians to cheer for their cricket team in an international contest. An Indian getting close to that honour was no less of a spectacle. Reading class solidarity in that support would obviously be a fallacy.

Middle class Indians can relate only aspirationally to Tharoor’s need to stay in a suite of five-star Taj Man Singh at his own expense while waiting for his official accommodation as Minister of State for External Affairs in 2009, to be refurbished. For a man who claims to have grown up with world of newspapers, Tharoor’s relationship with the media is rather fragile. When the Indian Express reported on Tharoor’s five-star hotel stay as a negation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s austerity drive, he had slammed the daily for what he sarcastically called the paper’s “talent for creating blazing stories out of trivia”.  The point, however, remains that the Manmohan Singh government asked Shashi Tharoor to vacate the hotel following the controversy caused by Indian Express report. It would be safe to assume that that was because it didn’t seem middle class enough.

Interestingly, Kesavan quotes a report from the same paper, The Indian Express, to make a rather tenuous point about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’ idea of the ideal Indian child.

Kesavan, it seems, has a rather generous view of Tharoor’s political capital.  Is he such an attractive catch or target for the Right? More significantly, apart from the high decibel Republic TV with its right-leaning ownership pattern and Subramanian Swamy, has any leader of the Right or rightwing organisation shown any interest in Tharoor’s political journey? Despite Tharoor’s popularity on social media, if cold logic of the number of followers of his Twitter handle is anything to go by, and his effective representation of Thiruvananthapuram in Lok Sabha, there is little else that makes him what Kesavan describes as a force to be reckoned with. Even his own party hasn’t been so enthused by his political potential.

Kesavan tries to position Tharoor as a “breathing incarnation” of everything that makes the right-wing uneasy about Nehruvian India. That’s not entirely correct. Ideologically, Tharoor could be running for the second spot if he is vying to be the torchbearer of Nehruvian legacy. The first one has already been cornered by his college senior, Mani Shankar Aiyar. None other than writer Nayantara Sahgal, Pandit Nehru’s niece, dedicated her book – Jawaharlal Nehru: Civilizing a Savage World (2010) in memory of Jawaharlal Nehru – to “Mani Shankar Aiyar who speaks the same language”. So Tharoor’s book, “Nehru – The Invention of India” (2004) hasn’t been enough to make him the chief inheritor of Nehru’s ideological relic.

Some of the damage has been self-inflicted. In 2010, at a talk organised by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), Tharoor said that he agreed with political theorist Bhikhu Parekh’s opinion that Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi’s foreign policies were too moralistic and a tad preachy. He argued that such policies had amounted to running moral commentary on affairs of the world, and gave Indians an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Predictably, Congress wasn’t amused by such comments. Tharoor, again predictably, attributed the controversy to the media misquoting him. He defended himself by saying that he was only giving an honest summary of Professor Parekh’s hour-long speech.

The Nehruvian mask hasn’t, however, stopped slipping. Within days of Narendra Modi assuming office as the Prime Minister of India in 2014, Tharoor lavishly praised Modi as an “avatar of modernity and progress”. Such endorsement of an alternative was definitely unsettling for Nehruvians, and far more to alarmist voices like that of Kesavan. In saying that, Tharoor chose to forget that Modi as then-chief minister of Gujarat had attacked him and his wife for their alleged involvement in the murky financial ownership of the now-defunct Kochi Tuskers IPL franchise.

So, while calculating the political assets and threat of Tharoor to right-wing organisations, chiefly the BJP, Kesavan has chosen to ignore the limitations of a name which would hardly have electoral appeal beyond his state, if not his constituency. To add to that, Tharoor carries the liabilities of the past taint of an alleged murky deal and the insinuations about his wife’s death.

Tharoor’s recent foray into anti-colonial scholarship, as seen in his latest book,  An Era of Darkness: British Empire in India (2016),  largely fits into a tradition of writings imbued with economic nationalism. A practice pioneered by Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder Dutt in the late Nineteenth century and early Twentieth century. Such a nationalist narrative can’t be disturbing for the right-wing worldview.

Moreover, men of letters having St Stephen’s-Oxbridge lineage, have never been in demand in the BJP. They haven’t gone beyond being nominated to Rajya Sabha – ask Chandan Mitra of The Pioneer, or for that matter Swapan Dasgupta. It’s intriguing that Kesavan attaches an exaggerated importance to Tharoor’s political stock and inflates his value for ideological battles.

In weaving a tale of right-wing obsession with Tharoor with the thread of a news channel’s frenzied pursuit of finding out the cause of his wife’s death, Kesavan unwittingly reveals his own obsession with the forces of conservative discourse in India. In the process, he takes detours which take us to a lot of places, but not where Tharoor stands today. That must have pleasantly surprised Tharoor too. The diplomat in him would never let us know how amazed he is.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @anandvardhan26