Tharoor quits: Adverse IB report scripts endgame for minister

Days after the Kochi IPL franchise issue snowballed into a major controversy and a source of embarrassment for the party at a politically critical time, the Congress core committee showed the door to minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor.

The minister tendered his resignation to prime minister Manmohan Singh around 9pm on Sunday; it was forwarded to president Pratibha Patil.

But long before Singh’s hectic two-hour deliberations with the party’s core committee, comprising Congress president Sonia Gandhi, cabinet ministers Pranab Mukherjee, P Chidambaram, and AK Antony, and Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel, the fate of the beleaguered minister was sealed by a confidential report of the Intelligence Bureau (IB).

The bureau, which was asked to look into Tharoor’s role in getting his friend Sunanda Pushkar a deal with the Kochi franchise of the Indian Premier League (IPL), reportedly gave an adverse six-page report against the minister.

The IB was roped in after Tharoor’s meeting with Gandhi on Thursday turned out to be unsatisfactory. According to a central intelligence officer, Tharoor was reportedly unable to give a clear picture of his stand on the issue.

“Immediately after the meeting, the IB was asked to conduct a confidential probe into the entire controversy,” the officer said.

According to sources, the bureau in its report advised the central government that it would be most appropriate if Tharoor were asked to resign.

The report, prepared by the IB along with the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), reportedly raised many questions regarding Pushkar.

“Even the preliminary reports given by the income-tax department on its findings in the IPL-Kochi dealings were taken into consideration while preparing the report,” the officer said.

The IB, along with other agencies, has also been tracking the source of money which has been used to bid for the Kochi franchise, the officer said.

The money was being sourced from Dubai, the officer said.

After the uproar in Parliament over Tharoor on Friday, the IB was asked to expedite its investigation and submit a report by Saturday, to coincide with the return of prime minister Manmohan Singh from his foreign tour.

The report was completed on Saturday and submitted to the prime minister’s office, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, defence minister AK Antony and home minister P Chidambaram.

But, despite the report, Singh met the Thiruvananthapuram MP to give him a fair hearing on the issue.

During the meeting at noon on Sunday that lasted 45 minutes, Tharoor is believed to have stuck to his claim of innocence.

It was only towards the end of the meeting, a source said, that the beleaguered minister offered to resign if it was felt that the controversy had “embarrassed the government and the Congress”.

The source said the Congress high command had already decided its stand on Tharoor before Sunday’s meeting, but waited for the prime minister to “take the final call”.

“Taking any decision in the PM’s absence was out of the question as doing so would have given the opposition another chance to gun for the Congress president," a senior party official explained. "The overwhelming feeling within the party was that Tharoor’s resignation was the only way left to nip this controversy and prevent it from embarrassing the government further.”

The source said it was largely the strong stand taken by Mukherjee that convinced Sonia Gandhi and the PM, both known to have a soft spot for Tharoor, to ask him to go.

Mukherjee, who, along with Antony, had already met Tharoor three times over the past few days to hear his version on the controversy, is learnt to have impressed upon the party leadership that with the opposition already upping the ante on the issue, it would be best to act rather than look complicit in shielding the minister.

Pushkar’s decision to surrender her sweat equity in Rendezvous Sports only added to Tharoor’s woes instead of aiding him.

The opposition was quick to claim that Pushkar’s move was an “admission of guilt”. Many in the Congress not just agreed, but they also felt that Pushkar’s move only strengthened the charge that she was a front for Tharoor in the Kochi deal.

The enormity of the controversy, however, was not just the only thing to have weighed on the minds of the Congress top brass during the meeting. The Tharoor issue struck the Congress-led UPA when the coalition had already shrunk to a wafer-thin majority in the Lok Sabha and was faced with a resurgent and vociferous opposition.

The choice in front of the government was to choose between protecting an individual minister and fighting for matters that ranked high in its priority list, like getting the finance bill and controversial legislations like the women’s reservation bill and nuclear liability bill cleared in Parliament.