'Jaishankar has been able to...': Shashi Tharoor praises EAM, says he is a 'specialist'

Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor has praised External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, saying he is a 'specialist' and has been able to hit the ground running. "I think he is very good, It (the appointment of Jaishankar) is an extremely interesting decision that the Prime Minister took," Tharoor said while speaking to Network 18. Jaishankar, who served as foreign secretary from 2015 to 2018, was made foreign minister in May 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned for the second consecutive term. 

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Tharoor said the foreign ministry requires a specialist, and that too, not just a specialist who happens to be a politician - but a specialist who has come recently from that service, spent a lifetime in that service, and knows everything inside out. "As a result, what you have seen, it seems to me, is a situation where the foreign minister has been able to hit the ground running in a way that a purely political minister would have perhaps not done the same way," he said. 

The Congress leader further said that certainly, in his estimation, the decision to appoint a bureaucrat in a political role raised a lot of eyebrows, "but it seems to me that it is a hallmark of Modi's style". He said there are many others in the government like Hardeep Singh Puri and RK Singh who are ex-bureaucrats.

"Hardeep Puri, for example. He is not a minister in a ministry he worked in. He is also a foreign ministry guy, who is working in urban development. Former Home Secretary RK Singh is handling power," Tharoor said. "He (Modi) has seen them as efficient technocrats, and he says (to appointed bureaucrats) now manage this portfolio and you know how government works. And there is a certain logic to this, and perhaps other governments could learn from that."

Tharoor, however, said that his views may reflect his own biases as he always preferred the presidential system to the prime ministerial one. "In the American (presidential) system, you are able to appoint the most talented people to the portfolios of your Cabinet without worrying about the electability - you worry about the ability, not their electability. Whereas in the parliamentary system, if you are not elected, you can't be a minister." 

"The skills to get you elected may not be the skills that you need to be a good minister. So what Modi does is that he absolves people like my friend Jaishankar from the need to get elected, and he says you do your job well and I will take care of putting you in one of the Houses of Parliament. That is an unusual innovative departure," the former minister said.                  

Recently, former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi attacked the Centre and Jaishankar for their handling of the border standoff with China. Gandhi said Jaishankar does not understand the China threat.