Shashi Tharoor: A Journey Through Education, Diplomacy, Politics, and Literature

Shashi Tharoor, a prominent figure in Indian politics, is also a celebrated author, a former international diplomat, and a public intellectual. Born in London on March 9, 1956, Tharoor's journey has been marked by academic excellence, a distinguished career in the United Nations, and a successful transition to Indian politics. This article delves into Tharoor's educational background, highlighting the formative years that shaped his multifaceted career.

Early Life and Schooling

Tharoor's father, originally from Kerala, held various positions in London, Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, including a 25-year career with The Statesman. Tharoor's parents returned to India when he was two years old. His early education began at the Montfort School in Yercaud in 1962, after which he moved to Bombay and attended the Campion School from 1963 to 1968. He spent his high school years at St. Xavier's Collegiate School in Calcutta.

Higher Education at St. Stephen's College, Delhi

In 1975, Tharoor graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from St Stephen's College at the University of Delhi. During his time at St. Stephen's, he was actively involved in student affairs, serving as the president of the student union. He also demonstrated his intellectual curiosity by founding the St. Stephen's Quiz Club, which fostered a culture of learning and intellectual engagement among students.

Advanced Studies at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Driven by a passion for international relations, Tharoor pursued advanced studies in the United States. In 1975, he went to The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford to obtain an M.A. in international relations. He completed his M.A. in 1976. Continuing his academic pursuits, Tharoor obtained a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 1977 and a Ph.D. in International Relations and Affairs in 1978. At the age of 22, he was the youngest person at the time to receive such an honor from the Fletcher School. While pursuing his doctorate, Tharoor was awarded the Robert B. Stewart Prize for Best Student.

United Nations Career (1978-2007)

Tharoor's career in the United Nations began in 1978 as a staff member of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. From 1981 until 1984 he was head of the UNHCR office in Singapore, during the boat people crisis, leading the organisation's rescue efforts at sea and succeeding in resettling a backlog of Vietnamese refugees. He also processed Polish and Acehnese refugee cases. After a further stint at the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, during which he became the first chairman of the staff elected by UNHCR personnel worldwide, Tharoor left UNHCR.

In 1989 he was appointed special assistant to the Under-secretary-general for special political affairs, the unit that later became the Peacekeeping Operations Department in New York. In 1996, Tharoor was appointed director of communications and special projects and executive assistant to Secretary-general Kofi Annan. In January 2001, Tharoor was appointed as Interim Head of the Department of Public Information (DPI) at the assistant-secretary-general level. He was subsequently confirmed as the under-secretary-general for communications and public information (UNDPI) with effect from June 1, 2002. In this capacity, he was responsible for the United Nations' communications strategy, enhancing the image and effectiveness of the organisation. In 2003 the secretary-general gave him the additional responsibility of United Nations coordinator for multilingualism.

Attempt for UN Secretary-General Post

In 2006, the government of India nominated Tharoor for the post of UN Secretary General. Had he won, the 50-year-old Shashi Tharoor would have become the second-youngest secretary-general, after the 46-year-old Dag HammarskjÃ¶ld. Although all previous Secretaries-General had come from small countries, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and National Security Advisor M. K. Tharoor finished second, behind Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, in each of the four straw polls conducted by the UN Security Council. In the final round, Ban emerged as the only candidate not to be vetoed by one of the permanent members, while Tharoor received one veto from the United States.

Transition to Indian Politics

In February 2007, amidst speculation about his post-UN future, the Indian press reported that Tharoor might be inducted into the Council of Ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as Minister of State for External Affairs. In the same month, an American gossip blog reported that Tharoor was a finalist for the position of dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles, but he withdrew his name from consideration at the final stage. Instead, Tharoor became chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures, which established the Afras Academy for Business Communication (AABC) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the city in which he would go on to win a record four parliamentary elections. Prior to embarking on his political career, Tharoor also served on the board of overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute, and the advisory boards of the Indo-American Arts Council, the American India Foundation, the World Policy Journal, the Virtue Foundation, and the human rights organisation Breakthrough.

At the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976, he founded and was the first chair of the editorial board of The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, a journal examining issues in international relations. Tharoor was an international adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva from 2008 to 2011. Tharoor once said that when he began his political career, he was approached by the Congress, the Communists, and the BJP. He chose the INC because he felt ideologically aligned with the party.

Political Career in India

In March 2009, Tharoor contested the Indian General elections as a candidate for the Congress Party in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. His opponents included P. Ramachandran Nair of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Neelalohitadasan Nadar of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), MP Gangadharan of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and PK Krishna Das of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Tharoor won the elections by a margin of 99,989. He was then selected as a minister of state in the Council of Ministers of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. On May 28, 2009, he was sworn in as minister of state for external affairs, in charge of Africa, Latin America, and the Gulf, including the Hajj pilgrimage, and the consular, passports, and visas services of the ministry.

Tharoor was a pioneer in using social media as an instrument of political interaction. Tharoor was also the first Indian minister to visit Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake. He reformed the arrangements relating to the conduct of the Hajj pilgrimage. He initiated new policy-planning activities on the Indian Ocean and represented India at various global events during his 11-month tenure as minister. In April 2010, Tharoor resigned from the position as Minister of State for External Affairs following allegations that he had misused his office to get shares in an Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket franchise. He denied the charges and, during his resignation speech in Parliament, called for a full inquiry.

Between 2010 and 2012, Tharoor remained active in Parliament and was member-convenor of the Parliamentary Forum on Disaster Management, a member of the Standing Committee on External Affairs, of the Consultative Committee of Defence, the Public Accounts Committee, and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Telecoms. He participated in several important debates of the 15th Lok Sabha, including on the Lokpal Bill, the demand for grants of the Ministry of External Affairs and of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the black money debate, and so on.

In 2012, Tharoor was re-inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with the portfolio of minister of state for Human Resource Development. In this role, he took special interest in the problems and challenges of adult education, distance education and enhancing high-quality research by academic institutions. He was responsible for the ministry's written answers to Parliament's questions and responded to oral questions on education during the Lok Sabha's Question Hour. As Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Tharoor became the first elected representative in India to issue annual reports on his work as MP, including furnishing accounts of his MPLADS expenditure.

In May 2014, Tharoor won his re-election from Thiruvananthapuram, defeating O. Rajagopal of the Bharatiya Janata Party by a margin of around 15,700 votes, and became a member of the 16th Lok Sabha, sitting in Opposition. In regards to Tharoor's removal from the post of INC spokesperson after he made positive remarks regarding Narendra Modi, Kolkata's The Telegraph opined, "For an Opposition MP to have and to exercise the freedom to appreciate a good thing done by the government and for a ruling party MP to speak and vote against the party line is not just legitimate parliamentary practice, it is the very essence of parliamentary democracy. Shashi Tharoor, from the ranks of Congress, has tried to do that; there is not one BJP MP who has matched him. In 2014, Tharoor was asked to help the treasury benches draft a statement condemning Pakistan for freeing Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the Lashkar-e-Toiba commander, who masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people.

In March 2017, Tharoor called for the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata to be converted into a museum on the effects of British colonial rule in India. Tharoor wrote in an Al Jazeera article that the British "conquered one of the richest countries in the world (27 per cent of global gross domestic product in 1700) and reduced it to, after over two centuries of looting and exploitation, one of the poorest, most diseased and most illiterate countries on Earth by the time they left in 1947. Tharoor has also attempted to introduce several Private Members' Bills in the Parliament, rare for an Indian parliamentarian. Notably, his efforts to amend Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code were voted out by the majority of parliamentarians on two occasions. The Apex court of India later ruled in favor of amending the controversial article in 2018, thereby vindicating the position advocated by Tharoor.

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Tharoor got elected to the AICC Working committee on August 20, 2023. While in opposition, he was appointed to multiple positions by the Modi-led government. In May 2025, he led the Indian government's US and Panama delegation for a diplomatic outreach program to key partner countries over the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack and India's subsequent retaliation against terror camps located in Pakistan, named Operation Sindoor. He termed the opportunity as a âgreat honourâ and a âmatter of dutyâ as a citizen of India and said he looks forward to playing his part in leading the delegation even as his party, Congress, has frowned upon his inclusion. He asserted that only national interest is above everything else. Tharoor explicitly identified Pakistan as the principal perpetrator.

Author and Columnist

O. P. Tharoor has been a columnist in each of India's three best-known English-language newspapers, most recently for The Hindu (2001â2008) and in a weekly column, "Shashi on Sunday," in the Times of India (January 2007 â December 2008). Following his resignation as Minister of State for External Affairs, he began a fortnightly column on foreign policy issues in the Deccan Chronicle. Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman magazine and the Indian Express newspaper, as well as a frequent contributor to Newsweek International and the International Herald Tribune.

Tharoor began writing at the age of 6, and his first published story appeared in the Sunday edition of The Free Press Journal, in Mumbai at age 10. His World War II adventure novel Operation Bellows about a RAF pilot Reginald Bellows, inspired by the Biggles books, was serialised in the Junior Statesman starting a week before his 11th birthday. The Great Indian Novel had had 43 reprints as of October 2014, and a Silver Jubilee special edition was issued on the book's 25th anniversary in October 2014, by Viking Penguin India.

Tharoor has lectured widely on India, and is often quoted for his observations, including, "India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay." He also coined a comparison of India's "thali" to the American "melting pot": "If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali â a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Shashi Tharoor's non-fiction work An Era of Darkness, published later in the United Kingdom as Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, arose out of a speech he made at the Oxford Union, was published in 2016. It has sold over 100,000 copies in hardback reprints and continues to be a bestseller in the country. The British edition rose to Number 1 in the London Evening Standard bestseller lists. Since then, he has published two other non-fiction books: Why I Am A Hindu (2018) and The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018), both of which have been published in the Indian subcontinent by the Aleph Book Company. The two books, both mega-bestsellers in India, raised very important questions. Why I Am a Hindu makes the point that it is precisely because Hindus form the majority that India has survived as a plural, secular democracy, a status that come under threat in the present world. In September 2019, he published a new book, The Hindu Way: An Introduction, in line with his r…

Awards and Recognition

Shashi Tharoor's contributions to Indian politics, diplomacy, and literature have been widely recognized. He has received several awards, including:

2004: Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (Indiaâs highest award for a nonresident Indian)
2019: Sahitya Akademi Award for An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

Linguistic Prowess

Tharoor is renowned for his eloquence and rhetorical prowess. His linguistic flair has entered Indian popular culture by way of his posts on X, which often feature such recondite words as floccinaucinihilipilification (âthe act of evaluating something as valuelessâ) and quomodocunquize (âto generate income through any available meansâ).

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