4 min readNew DelhiAug 9, 2026 06:27 AM IST
Amid row over his remarks Friday that “established parties will cease to be relevant unless they can listen to new voices” and questioning if “our finger was missing from the pulse of Gen Z”, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor Saturday said that his statements were distorted as an attack on his party.
At an event celebrating the 15th anniversary of India’s International Movement to Unite Nations in Mumbai Friday, Tharoor was asked why the Congress was not being able to mobilise students the way the CJP did at Jantar Mantar over alleged exam irregularities.
“I am very conscious of what you have to say… All the Opposition parties have to be conscious of the fact that we didn’t provide a route into our parties for the kinds of people who were at Jantar Mantar. And to my mind that is actually something we really need to examine. How do young people get into established parties? Where there are hierarchies, establishments, dynastic considerations, political networks. How does a young person come in… Can they actually be the people who make a difference?” he had said.
“I think we really need to wake up and smell the coffee. Let not our epitaph be that we were bypassed or became irrelevant because we failed to listen. The established parties will cease to be relevant unless they can listen to the new voices. We should have started hearing them already. Interestingly enough the issues taken up by the CJP and Jantar Mantar protesters had been taken up by us earlier. We had a Chhatron ki Goonj thing where (Leader of the Opposition) Rahul Gandhi was addressing students about paper leaks,” Tharoor had said.
Asked about ‘Chhatron ki Goonj’ not resonating with youth like CJP’s call, he had said: “Correct. And that’s why we need to ask ourselves, what did we fail to do? Did we fail to listen? Did we fail to tap into the old cliché of having our finger on the pulse of the people? Was our finger missing from the pulse of Gen Z?”
As his statements started doing the rounds on social media, Tharoor in a post on X Saturday said: “It takes a particular combination of incompetence and malice for some media to interpret my conversation with Rishabh Shah as an attack on my own party or its leadership. Here is the entire video, uncut and unexpurgated, in full, of the conversation. Watch it and judge for yourself, as clearly none of the journalists distorting it have done.”
Senior Congress leaders declined to comment on Tharoor’s remarks but quoted his statement on X Saturday.
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During Friday’s programme, Tharoor also spoke about July 20 police action on protesters in Delhi. “The whole thing was very badly handled. And as you know the result worked out in students’ favour and public opinion was so outraged… It became inevitable that the government would have to bend.”
On RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s recent remarks on Gen Z, Tharoor said: “I haven’t heard every single thing he said. But one of the things I was very struck by was his statement that the Gen Z protests were an expression in democracy, that they were justifiable, and nothing anti-national about protesting in a democracy… That is an absolutely essential lesson the entire political establishment needs to have learnt.”