 Shashi Tharoor seems to be all set to fight the elections for Congress president. He met Sonia Gandhi and if reports are to be believed then Sonia Gandhi has given him the go ahead to contest. Now why should you and I care about that? It's unlikely that Shashi Tharoor would win against a Gandhi family nominee unless they actually back him ultimately. The reason why it's important is because Shashi Tharoor represents a particular side of the Congress, which is actually polar opposite of what Rahul Gandhi stands for. And there I'm talking about economic policies. If Rahul Gandhi is notably anti-big business, if his rhetoric has largely been pro-working class, Shashi Tharoor is exactly the opposite. And how can we know this? We know this from whatever Shashi Tharoor has written over the years. And I'm going to start with the first thing that Shashi Tharoor became famous for, which is a novel that he wrote in 1989, which was called the Great Indian Novel. And why did he call it the Great Indian Novel? Because it was a kind of take on the Mahabharat, where the characters from the Mahabharat were taken, some of the story plots were taken from the Mahabharat. But they were fitted into contemporary India, from the national movement onwards to about 1984 when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. And it is interesting that Shashi Tharoor, he hadn't joined the Congress at that time. He names the Jawaharlal Nehru character Dhritarashtra and he says essentially that why is he Dhritarashtra? Because he is blind in his idealism and he has no idea of what empirical reality is all about. And what about the daughter? The daughter is called Priya Duryodhani. Now note that the opposition is called Pandavas and the Congress is called Kaurav. And the opposition leader, the leader of the opposition or the Pandavas or Yudhishtir is actually a Muradji Desai character. These are interesting things to look at. And in fact, if you look at Ved Vyas himself in this thing called VVG, now that seems to be a combination of several people who were part of the Congress syndicate or those who were opposed to the leftward shift or the socialist shift of the Congress from the time of Nehru himself. What could be a combination of C. Rajagopalachari and Neelam Sanjeevair Reddy. These are important indicators. But let's look at what Shashi Tharoor has to say about the Indira Gandhi characters policies and this is interesting because he is talking about bank nationalization. Let's look at it. Today we all realize what some of us had realized even then that nationalization which is bank nationalization only means transferring functioning and successful institutions from the hands of competent capitalists to those of bumbling bureaucrats. Now this is what he has to say about bank nationalization. What does he have to say about Nehru's economic policies? We don't know that from the great Indian novel but Shashi Tharoor wrote a biography of Nehru, a largely sympathetic biography of Nehru in 2003. And this is what he had to say about Nehru's policies. He basically called Nehru's insistence on planning and he called it planning with a capital P which he believed had become a fetish and a dogma in Nehru's time. He said that it actively impeded rather than facilitated the country's development. And that even the achievements of what were known as the achievements of Nehru in socialism which would be the bilage dams that were built, the IITs, the steel plants. He said that all this could have come through the private sector and that most of India's public sector industries were so inefficient that the country would actually have been better off without them. And he criticizes Nehru for having this mentality of being opposed to capitalism and not seeing it as an emancipatory force which one presumes Shashi Tharoor sees it as but rather as something that keeps the third world subjugated. That Nehru was a protectionist and that was bad for India. That is what led to what he pejoratively calls the Hindu rate of growth. And he approvingly quotes a very pro-market and anti-Nehruvian socialist economist Jagdish Bhagwati on this. So that is what we see directly from Shashi Tharoor's ideas on the economy. And this is important here because Shashi Tharoor also raised a parliament question recently in which he said that the government should allow lateral entry of private sector managers into the bureaucracy, into the IAS because that would cross-pollinate and make it better. And also that there should be mandatory temporary postings of government employees to private organizations and international agencies. Apparently because those are more efficient, they're better. And that would make the, you know, the bumbling bureaucracy work well. So very clearly Shashi Tharoor is pro-capital, pro-private sector, pro-market and anti-state intervention in the economy. And this is what is crucial as far as the Congress party goes because Shashi Tharoor's victory in that would mean, and unlikely victory, would mean that the Congress party would take a very strong line against what it has been doing till now and take a pro-corporate, pro-market line. It has been ambivalent on pro-market but it has generally tended to be under Rahul Gandhi, anti-big business, anti-monopoly capital and definitely much more pro-farmer, pro-worker than it had been under Manmohan Singh. And I'm going to end this with one more important thing that we see in Shashi Tharoor which is his cultural conservatism. And this came through during the Sabarimala controversy where Tharoor took a very careful line. He decided to say that he is on the side of the majority of people in Kerala who opposed the entry of women into temples because he said that it's all very well for liberals to say that this is false consciousness and that women are supporting this because there's a sort of stock-home syndrome because of which they have caught in the conservatism. But he said that when you disturb the beliefs of worshippers, you violate a space beyond reasoning. So this is the thing that Tharoor represents. He represents a particular kind of conservative, right-wing, English-speaking elite enlightenment discourse which we see in the West. And that is what he represents and therefore the so-called Lutians elite might like him. The question is whether the Congress can afford to have a Tharoorian turn away from what the Nehru Gandhi represents. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Subscribe to our channel, like this video and share it as well.