Shashi Tharoor never knew what his caste was until his classmate at Campion school, Rishi Kapoor posed this difficult question. How did he answer that? " I had no clue, I went home and asked my father who told me my caste. When I was a child, my father forsook the Nair label and only retained the house name. When we came back to India from London, he would tell me that there was no need for caste. My parents never made me feel about the need to know about caste. They didn't treat people based on caste," Tharoor said at a session named 'India's present' at Manorama Hortus on Friday.
So as someone who grew up without knowledge of caste, Tharoor has a reason why he accepts Congress' demand for caste census. " If you ask an upper-caste person whether caste is an issue, they would say no. Ask the same question to a lower-caste person, and they will say they grew up with caste-based issues every day. Here parties issue tickets during elections based on caste. The benefits and deprivation are based on caste, even the government fixes reservation based on caste. You can't ignore caste factor," he said.
Tharoor admitted during the session that he had been approached by the BJP to join the party. " During the time of Vajpayee, a Minister had come to my office in New York and asked me to join the party. I told him I saw India differently from how they saw the country. I also if they haven't read my books. One of the writers had told me that if I were to join the BJP, I would have to burn all of my books,'' he said.
He said that he found it hard to believe how people switch parties. When asked how he resisted the temptation to join the BJP given the scale of offer, Tharoor said politics was not just about positions but also about values. " It's not just about positions. When I joined politics, I asked myself why and I thought it was the best way to serve the nation," he said.
As a writer, Tharoor misses working on novels because he is unable to create an alternative moral universe. " My last 21 books are non-fiction. When you write a novel, you have to build an alternative moral universe and we should be able to relate to happenings in those universe as realities. You have to spend some time in that universe. My political obligations keep me busy. Non-fiction is interruptible, even if you come back after a work, you know how to proceed," he said.
Slamming the BJP government Tharoor said that even without declaring an emergency, the centre comes up with draconian laws.
