Congress presidential candidate Shashi Tharoor apologised “unconditionally” for a blunder in his manifesto for the AICC elections that had a map of India without parts of Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh. Tharoor later shared corrected versions after social media users, including the BJP, attacked him over it.
“No one does such things on purpose,” Tharoor tweeted with links to the revised manifesto, saying his team “made a mistake”. “We rectified it immediately and I apologise unconditionally,” he added.
Social media users called the wrong map “a massive goof-up” and “a shameful act”, with some accusing him of having “a divisive agenda”.
The BJP took a dig at Tharoor saying he put a “mutilated map” not having parts of Jammu and Kashmir may be to “find favour” with the Gandhis.
In a tweet, BJP’s IT cell head Amit Malviya said Tharoor put a mutilated map of India in his manifesto. Taking a swipe at Tharoor, he said, “While Rahul Gandhi is supposedly on a Bharat Jodo Yatra, wannabe Congress president is hell bent on dismembering India. May be he thinks this might help find favour with the Gandhis.”
Echoing similar sentiments, BJP’s national spokesperson RP Singh said, “It is not a mistake or blunder but laid policy of Congress about Jammu & Kashmir.”
The Congress sought to distance itself from the “egregious error”, trying to deflect the BJP’s attacks on Rahul’s ongoing ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh said the BJP was using “any flimsy excuse” as ammunition against party leader Rahul’s ‘Unite India March’.
“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. Only Dr. Tharoor and his team can explain this egregious error,” Congress chief spokesman Jairam Ramesh said.
This was the second time in three years that Tharoor, a former Union Minister, landed in a map-in-a-booklet controversy. In December 2019, he shared publicity material about a Kerala Congress protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and that had a similar problem. He deleted that tweet after the BJP’s IT Cell and leaders such as Sambit Patra went after him. He’d said the map was to “depict not the territory but the people of India”.
In the latest row, in his manifesto booklet with the tagline ‘Think Tomorrow, Think Tharoor’, he used a map with a network of dots representing Congress units across the expanse of India. It was different from India’s official map that includes parts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh occupied by Pakistan and China.