Shashi Tharoor

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Shashi Tharoor, 2013

Shashi Tharoor ( Malayalam ശശി തരൂർ ; born March 9, 1956 in London ) is an Indian lawyer , writer , politician and has worked as a diplomat for the UN Commission on Refugees in Geneva, Singapore and New York. From 2002 to 2007 he was one of the deputies of the General Secretary Kofi Annan and was responsible for public relations. Tharoor is a long-time member of the Congress Party , he was Minister of State in the Indian Foreign Ministry from 2009 to 2010 and is a prominent member of the Indian parliament Lok Sabha .

Life

education

Shashi Tharoor was born in 1956 to a Kerala diplomatic family in London, but grew up in India. He attended the Montfort School in Yercaud in Tamil Nadu in 1962 , the Campion Collage in Mumbai from 1963–1968 and graduated from the 1969–1971 Jesuit School of St. Xavier's High School in Kolkata . From 1972 to 1975 he studied at St. Stephen's College in Delhi , where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history.

At the age of 20 he moved to the USA and kept his center of life there for over 30 years. From 1975 to 1978 he studied international relations and international law in Massachusetts at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University . He received his doctorate at the age of 22 with the academic degree of Ph. D. after having completed two further “Masters”.

Career and family

In 1978, the year he graduated, he was accepted into the service of the UN. After a stopover at the UNHCR refugee agency in Geneva , he coordinated aid for the Vietnamese boat refugees in Singapore . From October 1989 to the end of 1996 he coordinated the "peacekeeping measures" in the crumbling Yugoslavia from New York , which he sometimes judges critically: "In some places we have failed, in some we had an inadequate mandate", and then almost defiantly: " overall, however, our role was positive ”. Annan's chief assistant since January 1997, and in July 1998 Annan appointed him UN communications director. Despite all the need for reform, with all the emerging marginalization of the United Nations in the Iraq war , Tharoor uses the abbreviation UN with pride: "It stands for UN-replaceable."

In January 2001 he became interim head of the United Nations Public Relations Department, where he was confirmed as Under-Secretary-General in June 2002. In 2003, Kofi Annan appointed him coordinator for multilingualism. In June 2006, Tharoor was nominated by his country to succeed Annan, whose office as UN Secretary-General had to be filled at the beginning of 2007. He was considered a favorite because he met all the necessary requirements due to his extensive insights and experience with UN processes. In addition, according to UN arithmetic, the next Secretary General had to come from Asia . This was countered by the fact that his origins from the emerging, populous economic and military power India could be an obstacle. At the beginning of October 2006, Tharoor withdrew his candidacy as UN Secretary-General because the South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon received the most votes in a test election. In four rounds of voting in the UN Security Council, Tharoor received ten votes from the fifteen members of the council. In the end, the US veto stopped him and Ban won the bid.

Tharoor is an elected member of the New York Institute of the Humanities , the Advisory Board of the Indo-American Arts Council, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy .

Tharoor is the father of twin brothers who both graduated from Yale University in 2006 and are currently working as a journalist or freelance short story writer. In 2010 Tharoor married his third wife, Sunanda Pushkar , a successful Indian businesswoman from Dubai. Sunanda Pushkar was found dead in a hotel in Delhi in 2014 after an alleged affair between Tharoor and a Pakistani journalist became public on Twitter. She died of an unspecified unnatural death. Shortly before, Pushkar and Tharoor had announced: "We would like to emphasize that we are happily married and we intend to continue to be so."

Writer and politician

Tharoor is one of the most outstanding contemporary Indian writers. His works include "The Great Novel of India", for which he received the most prestigious Indian literary prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize . His non-fiction book "India between Myth and Modernity" is required reading for all those interested in history and politics. A love story against the background of religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, “Aufruhr”, a highly regarded biography of the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and a satirical novel, “Bollywood”, are part of his broad literary repertoire. Tharoor regularly writes a column in the Indian daily newspaper Indian Express .

For Tharoor, literature and politics are “natural spiritual twins”, both trying to reconcile contradicting positions. And with both “it is not only decisive what is said, but also how something is said”. Tharoor believes that the two worlds do not interfere, but complement each other. It remains incomprehensible to him how politicians can get along without literature and writers without politics.

In May 2009, Tharoor ran for a member of parliament for the first time and won it; he represented the constituency of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. For ten months, from May 28, 2009 to April 18, 2010, he was Minister of State in the Foreign Ministry under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh .

India and globalization

"India is the most important country for the future of the world," says Tharoor. Cultural identity in times of globalization is a constantly recurring theme for the Indian-influenced world citizen Tharoor. For him India lies at the intersection of the decisive debates about whether a democratic system will manage to overcome the social upheavals resulting from globalization and to lead the population out of poverty; or whether an authoritarian, centralized system is required. Whether a society with pluralism of opinion can meet religious fanaticism, its own values ​​and its own ethos and push them back. And whether independent development is possible within the current of globalization or “ coca colonization ” is the inevitable consequence.

As a politician, he invokes the need for cooperation, for the world to grow together and for the United Nations to be in need of reform. The writer Tharoor has set himself the task of finding new ways and revitalizing old ones in order to strengthen one's own Indian identity and cultural self-assertion. Without the affirmation of both currents, he sees no progress.

Self-critical of India, Tharoor also addresses violence by quoting the British historian EP Thompson : “How should one assess a culture that has raised non-violence to a real moral principle, but whose freedom is born of blood and whose independence is how before being soaked in blood? "

In his speech on the "Reparations Debate" at the Oxford Union Society in Great Britain on July 22, 2015, Tharoor stated that India was in principle entitled to reparations for 200 years of looting by the British Empire : "India's share of the world economy was 27%, when the British arrived. When the British left, it was below 4%. Why? Because India was ruled for the benefit of Great Britain. Britain's rise has been financed by its sacking of India for 200 years. ”Tharoor stressed that the famine caused by the British killed between 15 and 29 million Indians. He described the "famous" famine in Bengal in 1943 during World War II, "when four million people died because Winston Churchill deliberately - as a written military policy - diverted vital food from the Bengali civilians as a food reserve to the robust British and allied soldiers in Europe" . Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Tharoor in a speech to Parliament on July 23, saying that his speech reflected “the sentiments of patriotic Indians on this issue” and shows “the impact that can be made with effective arguments by doing the right things right place says ".

Fonts (selection)

  • The great novel of India. Translated from English by Anke Kreutzer. Claassen Verlag, Hildesheim 1995.
  • The invention of India. The life of the Pandit Nehru. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006.
  • Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India. Hurst, 2017

Web links

Commons : Shashi Tharoor  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Georg Blume: The daredevil. In: taz.de . April 20, 2010.
  2. ^ Ajay Jha: Sunanda Pushkar found dead at Delhi hotel. In: Gulf News . 17th January 2014.
  3. ↑ Pritha Chatterjee: Sunanda Pushkar's death was sudden, unnatural, she had injuries: AIIMS. In: The Indian Express . 19th January 2014.
  4. ↑ OxfordUnion: Dr Shashi Tharoor MP - Britain Does Owe Reparations on YouTube , July 14, 2015 ..
  5. ^ Jason Burke: Narendra Modi endorses Britain paying damages to India for colonial rule. In: The Guardian . July 24, 2015.
  6. ^ Modi praises Shashi Tharoor's speech demanding reparations from Britain. In: Reuters . 23rd July 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Tharoor, Shashi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian UN employee
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH London