Shashi Tharoor can often seem like relic from a previous era of Indian politics. A man of refined manners and affectations, a charming eloquence and a born raconteur. He evokes the cohort of Indian politicians who drove the country’s independence movement – educated in the West’s great cathedrals of learning, and entirely comfortable in their halls of power and cultural milieu. India’s first prime minister post-independence – Jawaharal Nehru – joked that he was “the last English ruler of India”. Throughout his career, Tharoor has been a keen Nehruvian – in both style and substance.

At 22, Tharoor was the then youngest person to receive a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, having already obtained two Masters degrees. He immediately pivoted this into a career at the United Nations, first in the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and then in the Peacekeeping Operations Department. He would eventually seek the job of UN Secretary General, finishing second of seven candidates in 2006, just behind Ban Ki-moon.

From here Tharoor turned his attention to Indian domestic politics. Winning the federal seat of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala representing the Congress Party in 2009. A seat he has held ever since. Upon his election, he was made Minister of State for External Affairs – which is an assistant minister position in India – in the second government of Manmohan Singh, and given the role of advancing relations with African countries, where his fluency in French served the job well.

I happened to wander by his constituency office when I was in Kerala in 2016. Which is my kind of sight-seeing.

Despite being an MP – and an assistant minister for his first five years in parliament –somehow Tharoor has managed to also be a prolific writer. Barely a year has passed over the last decade and a half without him publishing a book. He is comfortable writing on history, foreign affairs, domestic politics, religion, as well as biographies of major Indian figures. He has published 25 books in total.

Yet these are not just works of non-fiction, as there are four novels among them. Most notably the slyly titled The Great Indian Novel, which is built on an ingenious framework that takes the Mahabharata – the epic poem of Hindu mythology – and resets its themes within the Indian independence movement and first decades of independence. With the major figures of Indian politics at the time taking on the traits of the characters from the Mahabharata.

Tharoor is also a compelling and persuasive speaker. He loves the thrust and parry of an argument, and can make one better than most. Even if his adherence to evidence can sometimes wane, he has honed a style of speaking that draws in an audience and leaves them fascinated by every word.

This all marks Tharoor as one of the world’s most disgusting overachievers. One of these people who has the confidence to turn his attention to whatever he likes, and excel at doing so. Making us all look pathetic by comparison.

Yet for all his achievements, the one job Tharoor actually wants – prime minister of India –is seemingly beyond his grasp. There are two big structural reasons for this.

The first is India’s current domestic political conditions. Although when Tharoor entered parliament, the Congress Party were strong enough to be able to lead a coalition government, this dramatically shifted with the rise of Narendra Modi as the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the majorities it was able to achieve at the 2014 and 2019 elections – and although short of a majority in 2024, still comfortably the largest party in the Lok Sabha (lower house). Despite improvements in its position at the last election, Congress is still a shell of its former dominant self.

The other structural reason thwarting Tharoor’s ambitions is the internal politics of the Congress Party. The party is the family business of the Gandhi family, and maintaining control of the party is their primary purpose.

Although Nehru himself would have likely found this situation unacceptable, his descendants have made the party their own following his death. His daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minster from 1966-1977, and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, her son Rajiv became PM following his mother’s death until 1989 (and was assassinated himself in 1991), and Rajiv’s wife, Sonia, became party leader in 1998.

Although Sonia would lead the party to victory in 2004, the BJP’s hostility towards her Italian heritage led her to step aside for Manmohan Singh to become prime minister. Since the defeat of the Singh government in 2014, Rajiv and Sonia’s son Rahul has either been the official or effective co-leader of the party with his mother – and he is currently serving as leader of the opposition in the parliament. Although, on paper at least, both he and Sonia have relinquished the presidency of the party.

This is the wall Tharoor found himself up against when the Congress Party held an internal election for the party presidency in 2022. The Gandhi family at the time felt that the optics of their party control was detrimental to its electoral fortunes, and decided to (formally, at least) relinquish the presidency. Tharoor sensed his opportunity to gain greater power within the party and use the position to elevate himself as the man who could effectively challenge and defeat Modi.

But, of course, the Gandhis would have seen Tharoor’s personal popular reach and independent ideas as a threat to their own power. And so a loyalist was found in Mallikarjun Kharge, and party members were strong-armed into throwing their support behind him. Kharge won 84% of the vote to Tharoor’s 11%.

Initially Tharoor accepted this with grace. But recently both his disgruntlement and ambition has begun to bubble to the surface. He’s been engaged in considerable, what we call in Australia, “freelancing” – when an MP starts pursuing ideas and positions outside of their party platform. In an attempt to build his power outside of the party.

This has begun by endorsing a number of foreign policy initiatives by the BJP-led government – including Operation Sindoor, which launched missile strikes on Pakistan-based militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba following the terrorist attacks in Kashmir. This led to Tharoor being sent by the government on a diplomatic mission to explain India’s actions to the world. With this mission probably being less about Tharoor’s eloquence on foreign media outlets, and more about seeking to wedge Congress on national security issues.

Tharoor has also raised the ire of his party by praising L.K Advani – the former BJP politician who played a central role in the destruction of the Babri Masjid by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992. Given that the destruction of the mosque and the subsequent building of a Hindu temple on its site is the central story in the BJP’s rise to power, one could see such praise for Advani as the path to making Tharoor acceptable to the BJP. Maybe not as an MP crossing the floor, but potentially for another official role like an ambassador, or even – at a stretch – India’s ceremonial presidency.

While Tharoor’s outreach to the BJP is a mild irritant to Congress, his direct attacks on his party have been infuriating.

Tharoor has recently written critically of “The Emergency” declared by Indira Gandhi from 1975-1977 – where elections were suspended, media and civil liberties were restricted and Gandhi’s political opponents were imprisoned. While Gandhi’s other son, Sanjay, oversaw a mass campaign of vasectomies. The Emergency was unquestionably a dark period of Indian history, but raising it is the third rail of internal Congress Party politics. No MP wanting to have a future in the party would do so.

If this wasn’t a big enough poke in the eye to the Gandhi family, two weeks ago he wrote an article for Project Syndicate titled Indian Politics are a Family Business. Tharoor’s article stated that “dynastic politics pose a grave threat to Indian democracy.” He declared it “problematic when candidates’ main qualification is their surname.” And that members of political families “are often particularly ill-equipped to respond effectively to their constituents’ needs.” And, in a clear dismissal of his own lost election for the party presidency, claimed there was a need for “meaningful internal party elections.”

All this was a hefty grenade hurled over the fence of 10 Janpath – the Gandhi family residence in New Delhi. It is likely that the relationship between Tharoor and the family is now permanently broken.

Yet it has been another recent endeavour by Tharoor that will have raised some eyebrows outside of India. At the start of September, Tharoor began a series called Imperial Receipts – based on his book Inglorious Empire – for the Russian propaganda network, RT. Which was formerly known as Russia Today, but retreated into just RT to disguise its origins in the hope of expanding its influence.

Tharoor is, of course, not wrong to expose the nature of Britain’s colonial project in India. Yet doing so via an outlet of blatant Russian propaganda reeks of a certain cynicism. Not to mention hypocrisy, given Russia’s own brutal imperialism. Both historical and present.

The purpose for RT with such a program is to arouse anti-Western sentiments within India (and beyond), and have these be converted into a suspicion towards the West’s support for Ukraine. To establish a narrative that that the West aren’t just historical colonial brutes, but modern-day ones too. To create the informational conditions that would lead people to believe Russian narratives that it is the actual victim in its invasion of Ukraine.

As India is now courted by the West as an essential partner to balance the power of the People’s Republic of China, and hopefully play a role in countering Russian aggression, Moscow is using programs like this – and people like Tharoor – to try and prevent more cooperative and friendly relations between India and the West.

Tharoor is smart enough to know that the Russians are using him in this way, and smart enough to know Russia’s narrative that he is helping advance is pure bullshit. But his cynical ambition and desperate need for the spotlight is clouding his better judgement. It is unfortunately the case with men like Tharoor that the one capability they lack is the most important one – humility.

Although I have been drawn away from India in recent years, the country remains one of my great loves. I love being in India, and with my fondness for public transport, I love cramming myself into buses and trains to travel through cities and around the country – and due to this I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time tracking down songs from 80s Tamil films that bus drivers in southern India love to blast out to their passengers. Despite some fraught recent trends, Indian domestic politics is fascinatingly complex, with a vast array of moving parts that defies any neat characterisation. Indian food in all its regional varieties is clearly the world’s superior cuisine, and Indians themselves are warm, hospitable, interesting, informative and funny. 

So when a message popped up in my inbox from Aditi Mukund informing me she was in Melbourne and asking whether I’d have time for a coffee (or tea in my case), I, of course, said yes. Aditi had been in Melbourne to participate in the Quadmin Emerging Leaders Dialogue organised by Latrobe University. The dialogue was designed to bring together some of the best young talent from Australia, India, Japan and the United States to build connections and exchange ideas as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) starts to take a more formal shape and establishes greater habits of cooperation.

Aditi had been identified as one of India’s emerging leaders due to her role as a Program Associate at the Kubernein Initiative, a Mumbai-based, female-led, think tank that works on issues of India’s engagement with the world, with a focus on climate and water security and Aditi’s own specialty, feminist foreign policy. She was the project lead on report issued by Kubernein earlier this year titled Opportunities for a more Inclusive Indian Foreign Policy, which sought to assess where India’s Ministry of External Affairs and its diplomatic corps currently are with female representation – and also project ideas about feminist foreign policy from an Indian perspective, and within the unique conditions of India and its neighbourhood. 

Aditi and I initially met at a café attached to the State Library of Victoria. While the old walls of the building echoed everyone’s conversations into a knotty din, we still managed to have a lovely couple of hours discussing India’s current place in the world, its foreign policy objectives, the complexity of its domestic politics, the emergence of Australia’s increasingly influential Indian diaspora, and her work on feminist foreign policy – an area of interest of mine as well, although I would claim no great personal expertise. But with far more to discuss we organised to catch up again via Zoom when she was back in Mumbai. 

Gender affects almost all aspects of human relations, from the personal to the political and, as we are increasingly becoming aware, international relations. It has been known for some time that a country’s development is heavily reliant on the advancement of women, but we are also now coming to understand that the psychology of violence is similar whether on a personal or state-based level. Authoritarianism – regardless of its strain – frequently has control of women as a central pillar, and women often disproportionately suffer the consequences of war and instability.

The success of movements against authoritarianism rely not just on female participation, but on women being the active drivers of change. This reality is currently being demonstrated in Iran with both the treatment of women being the trigger for the resistance movement, and women’s organised response being the dominant challenge to Iran’s theocratic government. 

Over the past decade the protest movements of the Arab Spring had some limited successes, but they also remain on-going concerns that can’t be dismissed due to a lack of immediate results. For Aditi’s Masters’ dissertation she focused on the narratives that emerged from the desire for change in Egypt and Tunisia, and how women were central actors in these movements. It was through this work that she decided gender in international relations would be where she wanted direct her skills and expertise. 

Upon realising that her dissertation had less than 30 percent citations from female authors, Aditi established the Women In International Relations Network to promote female scholars with expertise in various issues of foreign affairs. She created this partially as a way of promoting the work of women working in international relations who should be more influential, but also to centre India as a critical access point for foreign policy scholarship and analysis. 

Joining a female-founded and led organisation in the Kubernein Initiative has allowed Aditi to pilot the development of what an Indian perspective on feminist foreign policy would be. As a concept initially devised by Sweden, and having aspects subsequently adopted by mostly Western states (with some notable exceptions), there was a need for these ideas to be given a non-Western perspective. Aditi’s objective was to find how there can be practical implementation of feminist foreign policy within India’s current foreign policy. 

Kubernein began the project that became the Opportunities for a more Inclusive Indian Foreign Policy report by conducting workshops, discussions and interviews about these ideas with other Indian foreign policy think tanks, staff within the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), former ambassadors, academics and journalists to try and get a sense of how gender was understood within Indian foreign policy, what ideas were already present within the system, and where are the current opportunities to advance these ideas. 

A key feature of this process was to put experts in different fields in the same room – whether this be experts in foreign policy, trade relations or climate, as well as gender – people who might not usually interact professionally with one another, in order to break down silos that may not initially consider gender in their work, but also as a way of seeding feminist – or more broadly inclusive – ideas into India’s foreign policy ecosystem, from where they can influence the MEA. Aditi notes that in India it has been India’s think tanks that initially provided female scholars with a voice in foreign and security policy and decision-making. 

This influence looks to be producing results. What caught my eye while reading the report – and something that Aditi also wanted to highlight in our discussion – was a statement from last year by India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar. The quote is slightly truncated in the report, but I tracked down the whole statement as I think it is worth quoting in full: 

“I agree that we need to look at the world from the perspective of women, we need a gender-balanced foreign policy. We need to look at three things here: Getting more women to engage with foreign policy issues, reflect women’s interest in foreign policy, and bring in a feminist perspective to foreign policy.”

Despite Australia’s current and previous two foreign ministers being female – and admittedly championing many positive gender-focused advancements in Australia’s foreign policy – it would be extraordinary for any of them to make such a clear and direct statement. Maybe Dr Jaishankar has the advantage of being a man and this shields him from the negative knee-jerk reactions that female politicians have to deal with, but it also indicates that these ideas are being taken seriously at the highest level in India, and that Dr Jaishankar sees India’s interests as being aligned with a greater understanding of gender. 

With Dr Jaishankar’s attention, Aditi feels that there are some immediate areas where a gender lens could be integrated into India’s foreign policy. This includes how climate change affects women and other marginalised groups and how India can cooperate with its neighbours on adaptation and mitigation; understanding the benefits and implications of Indian trade and future trade agreements for women; and issues of non-traditional security through India’s overseas aid and development assistance programs, with a particular focus on health. 

Like in the West, in India there is a difficulty for some men to stomach the term “feminist” – leading to an unfortunate and counter-productive backlash – so there’s a preference for the term “inclusive” in Aditi and Kubernein’s work as a substitute. However, this is also due to the complexity of India itself and of its region, and how this should inform India’s approach to foreign policy. So “inclusive” can be seen as a broader concept than just a focus on women, expanding to be an awareness of how policy affects those who may not be a region’s dominant or enfranchised group. Particularly taking into account the complexity of India’s land borders, which often include strong cross-border cultural connections that political boundaries may inhibit. 

Of course, institutionalising this perspective on inclusivity requires a significant social and cultural transformation in India, with large scale education and sophisticated awareness campaigns. India remains a patriarchal and casteist society, and one that is still struggling to acknowledge and provide rights for same sex attracted people and those who do not fall neatly into a gender binary. Aditi highlighted that only 9 percent of women in India are part of the formal workforce, an extraordinary statistic that not only limits female agency, but prevents upward pressure on the state to act in their interests and understand their perspectives. Gender equality at home is essential to promote gender equality abroad. This is true for Australia as well as India.

As we concluded our chat, Aditi left me with a clear series of considerations as she continues to advance the idea of a feminist foreign policy for India. Although feminist foreign policy may have certain outcomes in mind, it is primarily a lens that policy is created through. This requires buy-in from a larger group of stakeholders, as the MEA has to operate with a degree of social legitimacy, and these ideas require allies within India’s broader foreign policy ecosystem. There needs to be a recognition from proponents of feminist foreign policy that pushback is natural, and that not all pushback is negative and driven by a suspicion of women. And to be successful Aditi and her colleagues need to build a coalition of allies, a web of resources, and a solid bank of knowledge – and to do so methodically and thoroughly, “so there are fewer holes to poke when you actually announce a feminist foreign policy.”