Shashi Tharoor Says Will Not "Confirm or Deny" Letter to Sonia Gandhi

Thiruvananthapuram:  Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor has refused to confirm or deny that he has written a letter to party president Sonia Gandhi after she upbraided him about his comments at a party meeting being reported in the press.

“I am not going to say anything which can legitimise your line of enquiry by denying or confirming,” Mr Tharoor told reporters on Friday in Thiruvananthapuram, his Lok Sabha constituency.

The two-page letter, apparently an email addressed to Mrs Gandhi, seems to confirm the Congress President’s rare outburst against Mr Tharoor. It says he was “dismayed, indeed distressed, by our exchange at the morning meeting,” and that the “press leaks” were part of an agenda “maliciously aimed” at portraying him as isolated in the party.

Shashi Tharoor had last week told a session of Congress MPs that he disagreed with the strategy to disrupt Parliament and prevent it from functioning to pressure the BJP-led government into sacking three top leaders.

Mr Tharoor’s note of dissent was widely reported in the media, provoking Mrs Gandhi to reportedly say to him angrily, “You always do this.”

Why on earth would I have spoken to the media to undermine myself and my standing within the party?” the letter says, alleging that the “leakers” have convinced Mrs Gandhi that Mr Tharoor has been speaking to the press against the party’s interests.

He assures Mrs Gandhi that he has kept away from the press “ever since my personal tragedy and the ghoulish attention I have received,” an apparent reference to the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar last year.

And that when he has spoken to the media, it has been on record. “Leaking is the habit of conspirators and cowards; I am neither,” the letter says, and seeks to assure the Congress chief that Mr Tharoor has served the party’s interests “with sincerity and to best of my ability, while often feeling that this has neither been seen nor appreciated.”