Brit MP criticises Nehru, Tharoor backs his view

New Delhi: Shashi Tharoor, the Minister of State for External Affairs, will be hard pressed to explain this to his party, the Congress.

Tharoor has said he agrees with criticism that the foreign policy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first Prime Minister and the Congress’ biggest icon, was a “moralistic running commentary”.

Tharoor criticised Nehru at a lecture by British MP Lord Bhikhu Parekh in New Delhi on Friday. Parekh, in his lecture, said Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi’s policies presented India in a light of “moral self-righteousness”.

Tharoor agreed and said he had pointed this out in his books.

"That Lord Parekh and I have fought alike on issues of India's identity and India's domestic arrangements as well... So we do, I am afraid, come from a similar outlook of the world," he said.

"I think his (is a) very clear summary for us of the way in which Indian foreign policy drew from our founding fathers' sense of our civilisational heritage, the extraordinary contribution of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to the articulation of that civilisational heritage, the manner in which that both enhanced India's standing in the world and gave us the negative reputation for conducting foreign policy as a sort of moralistic running commentary on other people's behaviour."

Sources in the Congress told CNN-IBN that External Affairs Minister S M Krishna will take a look at Tharoor’s comments.

Krishna in December snubbed his junior minister for questioning the government’s proposed visa guidelines, saying if he had any "perceptions" those should be discussed within the "four walls" of the government.

"These (issues) are not to be discussed in public. I think it should be sorted out within the four walls of the ministry," Krishna had said about Tharoor's comments on social networking site Twitter regarding tightening of visa rules.

Tharoor, a former international diplomat, created a huge controversy in September when he posted a message on Twitter that he would travel “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”.

The Congress was set to take action against him but the row ended when he apologized and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called his ‘Tweet’ a joke.

CNN-IBN’s Pallavi Ghosh reports that Congress leaders are angry at Tharoor’s comments and view it as a breach of party ideology but will leave it to his boss, S M Krishna, to handle the latest controversy.