Can Tharoor conjure up a 'Mamdani moment' in Indian politics? If Tharoor’s strength lies in articulation, Mamdani’s lies in mobilisation.
Published Nov 19, 2025 | 12:53 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 19, 2025 | 12:53 PM
To truly matter again, Shashi Tharoor (left) must risk something for what he believes in. He must step out of New Delhi’s drawing rooms and into India’s streets, listening to the same voices Zohran Mamdani listened to.
Synopsis: The contrast between Tharoor and Mamdani is stark. If Tharoor’s strength lies in articulation, Mamdani’s lies in mobilisation. If the former’s career has been defined by intellect, the latter’s ascent has been defined by organisation.
Shashi Tharoor’s recent effusive praise for veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani — calling him a “venerable” person and “true statesman” who has lived “an exemplary life of service” — has left India’s intellectual class, and his Congress party colleagues, gasping.
Coming from a party MP, who is expected to condemn a figure whom historian Ramachandra Guha once called “the most divisive Indian,” this gushing tribute may be more than a simple political courtesy; it could be a declaration of a new political centre.
A question that is doing the rounds now among the supporters of the former UN diplomat and four-time Member of Parliament is: Can Tharoor — an outsider in the Congress whose path within the party has been fraught with cold shoulders and subtle marginalisation — recreate a
genuine political moment in India akin to what Zohran Mamdani did in New York?
Tharoor’s entry into Indian politics in 2008 was a moment of dazzling promise. The man who nearly became the UN Secretary-General, brimming with cosmopolitan polish and a formidable intellect, seemed like the natural bridge between a rising global India and its national renewal. His quick wit and unflappable poise made him a star. The Congress, too, basked in the borrowed light of his global stardom.
But the promise slowly withered.
In a party where lineage trumps merit — a point Tharoor himself has made, even calling dynastic politics a “grave threat” to Indian democracy — he never found a secure footing. He contested, unsuccessfully, for the party president’s post, cementing his role as the internal dissident. He
was too polished to be populist, too independent to be trusted, and thus became the eternal outsider.
The significance of the “Mamdani moment” that Tharoor might aspire to replicate is not in any celebrity lineage, but in the grassroots depth that New York City’s 111th mayor, as a community organiser, could muster.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory, achieved at the young age of 34, was the triumph of an idea built from the bottom up. His campaign focused relentlessly on “kitchen-table issues” — housing costs, transportation, and childcare. He translated intellectual conviction into collective action.
When Mamdani quoted Jawaharlal Nehru in his victory speech, he was not indulging in nostalgia but reclaiming the language of moral politics.
“A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new,” he quoted from Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech, reminding his audience that ideals need not be relics.
The contrast between Tharoor and Mamdani is stark. If Tharoor’s strength lies in articulation, Mamdani’s lies in mobilisation. If the former’s career has been defined by intellect, the latter’s ascent has been defined by organisation.
Tharoor’s political pivot now seems crystallising around an ideological call for “centrist liberalism.” This is not merely a moderate stance but a conscious attempt to seek a new space between the Congress’s traditional, yet increasingly diluted, socialist legacy and the BJP’s potent
communalism couched as cultural nationalism.
The model he suggests is that of the now extinct Swatantra Party, founded by C Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and others in 1959. It was a formidable counter-narrative to Nehru’s socialist state.
At its peak, the party represented classical liberalism in the Indian context: pro-enterprise, anti-statist, yet socially progressive. In the 1967 general elections, it won 44 seats and 8.6 percent of the national vote, becoming the principal opposition. It stood for a market-based economy,
individual enterprise, and minimal state intervention. However, it ultimately dissipated in the 1970s, partly due to the shifting political landscape and the death of its main leaders.
For Tharoor, championing this centrist space today — a “Swatantra Congress Party” of sorts — is a bid to appeal to a demographic tired of both the state-centric economics of the past and the ideological battles of the present. It could potentially attract a new-age urban, aspirational
electorate, professional meritocrats, and minorities who may detest the BJP’s faux nationalism but feel discouraged by the Congress’s dynastic structure and internal fissures.
“I believe my vision of centrist liberalism constitutes a pragmatic roadmap for a politics that is principled, inclusive, and future-ready… In India’s ideas-starved politics, centrist liberalism, couched in a grammar of hope, can offer not just critique but construction. It is time to revive it —
not as nostalgia, but as necessity,” Tharoor recently wrote in a mainstream Indian magazine.
However, a Tharoor bid for the revival of a centrist liberal front — if it ever happens — could face a steep, if not impossible, climb. The political and social architecture of India today is fundamentally different from 1959.
The BJP’s couched cultural nationalism has consolidated a vast social base, and a “centrist liberal” clash with it will essentially be a formidable tussle with identity politics.
Once the moral and intellectual backbone of the Indian republic, liberalism today finds itself squeezed between populist nationalism and left-wing protest. Its voice, increasingly confined to seminars and newspaper columns, lacks the rhythm of the street. In this vacuum, centrist liberalism could become a rallying point for India’s moderate majority — those who reject both ideological rigidity and sectarian politics.
To truly matter again, Tharoor must risk something for what he believes in. He must step out of New Delhi’s drawing rooms and into India’s streets — from the podium to the pavement —listening to the same voices Mamdani listened to: drivers, labourers, minorities, the betrayed
and the forgotten. His challenge is not one of ideas, but of immersion.
The leap from an Oxford University stage to a panchayat meeting is wide, but not impossible to bridge. He must, in essence, rediscover politics not as spectacle, but as service.
A Tharoor-led political movement — be it a “Swatantra Congress Party”, or an external liberal front — would only work if it is built not on literary flourish, but on lived solidarity. It needs to translate the 8.6 percent national vote share of the old Swatantra ideal into an enduring, modern movement.
Can the Congress MP’s centrist liberal vision revive India’s fading liberal imagination in a polarised political age?
Anybody’s guess, but if he succeeds, it could be a ‘Mamdani moment’ for India.
(The author is a former UN spokesperson. Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
