NEW DELHI: The Congress on Thursday softened its stance towards senior party leader Shashi Tharoor hours after after the MP defended his Line of Control (LoC) remark in a strongly worded post on X by saying he is “very much part of family”.Seeking to ease internal friction, Congress general secretary Randeep Surjewala reiterated that Tharoor remains an important part of the party.“Shashi Tharoor is a senior Congress leader and very much part of the Congress family. However, what he said about the surgical strike was factually incorrect,” Surjewala told reporters.“The Congress party only corrected the record by pointing out that the surgical strike on Pakistan and also at other places on the den of terrorists were regularly executed during Congress-led UPA government to give a befitting reply to terrorists by our armed forces and the then Congress Government,” he added when questioned on the war of words between some Congress leaders and Tharoor.Surjewala’s statement comes as Tharoor faces criticism from party colleagues over his recent remarks on surgical strikes.Tharoor, currently leading a multi-party delegation to countries including Panama and the US, had said that India conducted its first cross-border surgical strike in 2016, a claim seen by many in the party as undermining similar operations during the UPA era.Facing flak from Congress leaders such as Pawan Khera and Udit Raj, Tharoor defended himself in a strongly worded post on X from Panama City, clarifying that his remarks specifically referred to responses to terrorist attacks—not to prior wars or conflicts.“After a long and successful day in Panama, I have to wind up at midnight here with departure for Bogota, Colombia in six hours, so I don’t really have time for this — but anyway: For those zealots fulminating about my supposed ignorance of Indian valour across the LoC: in the past,” Tharoor said in a post on X. “I was clearly and explicitly speaking only about reprisals for terrorist attacks and not about previous wars and my remarks were preceded by a reference to the several attacks that have taken place in recent years alone, during which previous Indian responses were both restrained and constrained by our responsible respect for the LoC and the IB,” he added.The controversy erupted after Tharoor reportedly stated in Panama that India breached the LoC “for the first time” during the 2016 surgical strike. This prompted a sharp response from his party colleague Udit Raj, who accused Tharoor of denigrating Congress’s legacy. “How could you denigrate the golden history of Congress by saying that before PM Modi, India never crossed LoC and International border?” Raj questioned.He went so far as to suggest Tharoor be made a “super spokesperson of the BJP.”Pawan Khera also weighed in, posting a screenshot from Tharoor’s book, where the MP had previously criticised the Modi government for politicizing the 2016 strikes while acknowledging that the Congress had authorised several such operations in the past without publicising them.“The shameless exploitation of the 2016 ‘surgical strikes’… as a party election tool—something the Congress had never done—marked a particularly disgraceful dilution of the principle that national security issues require discretion and non-partisanship,” Tharoor wrote at the time.Despite the public discord, the Congress leadership has now sought to downplay the fallout. Surjewala stressed that setting the record straight should not lead to “acronyms or doubts” within the party.
