Where even death is a poll issue

It is only on glossy election posters spattered all over Thiruvananthapuram constituency that Sashi Tharoor appears boyishly happy. In flesh and blood, he is confused and angry. Tharoor said he never expected the death of his wife to be turned against him. “My poor darling wife was neither stabbed, nor asphyxiated, nor suffocated, nor poisoned. In these circumstances why should I expect to have my own grief used against me? I find that very strange,” he said.

Former minister and CPM leader M Vijayakumar had said that Tharoor had a ‘PhD in violence against women.. A young CPI legislator, V S Sunil Kumar, called him a “murderer”. Tharoor said that the bruises that had appeared on Sunanda Pushkar’s body because of Lupus have been “deliberately dramatised” to attack him. Even those who were alleging foul play could not explain what kind of foul play, he said.

Had the death of his wife not been the centre of the issue, Tharoor suggested that the offensive would have seemed funny. “If a person has not been killed by any of the means known to humanity, then how else? The last was poison and that has been ruled out. Now what? Thought control? Or was it voodoo magic? What are they suggesting,” Tharoor asked.

Nonetheless, he will not respond to the charges. “For me to reply to each of these things will be to legitimise what has to be treated with contempt and what is already a violation of the election code of conduct,” Tharoor said. But he is not ready to forgive. When Tharoor met Vijayakumar at a social function recently, he just cut him dead. “I believe he owes me an apology and till that apology comes he won’t hear from me,” he said.

Tharoor calls this assault a “shameless and cynical” tactic to move the election debate onto territory the opposition is comfortable with. “My interest is to keep the debate on development for which they have no answer. None of the arguments that they were expected to use like I had disappeared after elections, that I had no connection with the local people, that I did nothing for Thiruvananthapuram… none of them worked because I have been here, I have been available, I have been very visible, almost too visible in their eyes, and I have also done enormous amount of work,” he said.

But what seems to rankle him most is the refusal of his political rivals in the state to mourn his loss. “I myself have gone to the homes of many communist leaders and condoled them on their grief. In Delhi, both Left and BJP leaders have condoled me. Arun Jaitley came to my home and sat for an hour to express condolence. It is only in the petty murky world of a particular election in Kerala that we have seen this deplorable behaviour,” he said.