Tharoor blunders on India map again in manifesto for Congress presidential poll

Congress presidential candidate Shashi Tharoor on Friday issued a clarification over the map blunder in his manifesto stating that “no one does such things on purpose” and added that his team of volunteers had committed a mistake.

“Re the troll storm on a manifesto map: No one does such things on purpose. A small team of volunteers made a mistake. We rectified it immediately and I apologise unconditionally for the error,” the Congress MP said in a tweet. He also shared the link of the rectified manifesto.

Earlier, the election manifesto shared by him showed a “distorted map of India” in which he omitted parts of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

The goof-up by Tharoor, who is running for the president’s post of the country’s oldest party does not show good precedent.

Later Tharoor rectified the blunder by replacing it with the correct map of India in his election manifesto.

This is not the first time the Lok Sabha MP has shared a distorted map of India. Earlier in 2019, Tharoor shared a ‘distorted’ map of India on Twitter. The northernmost territory of the country was missing from the map shared by the Congress leader.

In December 2019, he shared the cover of a booklet about the Kerala Congress’s protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). He later deleted the tweet and rectified his mistake.

Party communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh called the distorted map an “egregious error”, putting the onus of explanation on Tharoor and his team.

He was responding to a tweet by BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya who took a dig at Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ and Tharoor.

“The BJP is clearly panicking now that the Bharat Jodo Yatra has entered Karnataka. The “I Troll Cell” (IT Cell) of the BJP will look for any flimsy excuse to target and tarnish the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Rahul Gandhi. Only Dr Tharoor and his team can explain this egregious error,” Jairam Ramesh said in a tweet.

Malviya said, “Shashi Tharoor, Congress’s presidential hopeful, puts a mutilated map of India in his manifesto. While Rahul Gandhi is supposedly on a Bharat Jodo Yatra, wannabe Congress President is hell-bent on dismembering India. Maybe he thinks this might help find favour with the Gandhis.”

Tharoor has issued a manifesto explaining how he intends to rejuvenate the party through decentralisation and internal reorganisation if he wins the election.

He also promised to increase focus on youth and to give a bigger role to women in the party.

Tharoor will primarily take on another veteran leader of the Congress, Mallikarjun Kharge, for the party president post. Jharkhand Congress leader KN Tripathi, too, has filed his nomination.

Earlier, Digvijaya Singh and Ashok Gehlot said that they have dropped out of the race.

The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister visited Kharge at his residence this morning. “I told him that I stand by him and can’t even think of contesting against him, I will be his proposer,” Singh told reporters.

Nominations for the post of Congress president closed at 3 pm today and results will be declared on October 19.