Shashi Tharoor's Kashmir visit sparks row, snowballs into Congress vs Congress tiff

SHashi Tharoor's reinvigorated see to jammu and kashmir has go under away yet another row with his party as the Congress' J&K unit criticised him for not meeting his party colleagues, even though he met L-G Manoj Sinha.Congress MP Tharoor shared a post on X as he talked about his meeting with L-G Sinha in Srinagar and how the situation in the erstwhile state of J&K is inching towards ‘normalcy’. Tharoor wrote that he discussed J&K situation with the L-G and ‘the encouraging progress towards normalcy.’Also read: 'There could be only one Shiv Sena': Uddhav Thackeray amid row over MPs' switch to Shinde camp“When I arrived he was chatting to the President of the Kashmiri Writers’ Association and the Women’s Organisation — a positive outreach that I welcomed. Many challenges remain and much remains to be done, but I left the meeting feeling more positives than I have felt for a while,” Tharoor wrote on X. Congress reacts Tharoor was in Srinagar for Nalanda Dialogues. However, the J&K unit of the Congress expressed its disappointment with Tharoor not meeting the people of Kashmir or his party colleagues.“People of Kashmir too were expecting you to meet them to have a better understanding of the ground realities. Atleast could've spared sometime to meet own partymen fighting for statehood snatched from us 7 years ago,” Ravinder Sharma, JKPCC spokesperson, wrote in response to Tharoor's X post. Congress vs TharoorThis came in close heels with Tharoor's faceoff with his own party. The Grand Old Party on Saturday slammed Tharoor over his "admiration" for Prime Minister Narendra Modi for remarks that "PM Modi made his point clear both in the public and private meetings with the president."The party said it appears to have transcended the physical world as he now seems capable of hearing what the prime minister never even said.Also read: High-level panel for final deal, Lebanon truce, Hormuz safety: Takeaways from Round 1 of US-Iran talksTharoor, the party's Thiruvananthapuram MP, however, said he found it extraordinary that a statement about protecting Indian civilian sailors was given a partisan twist.He reportedly said, "It is important to convey the message that in wartime, civilian sailors on commercial ships should not be targets of combat. They are not soldiers, and that is the message PM Modi conveyed."Asked about the comments, Congress' media and publicity department head Pawan Khera said at a press conference that he had not seen Tharoor's statement but he had also not seen in the India-US joint statement a mention of the killing of three Indian sailors by the United States in the Gulf of Oman, challenging of Trump's repeated claim on halting Operation Sindoor, and the attack on Iranian frigate IRIS Dena.Also read: 54 injured, 18 missing after major explosion at Qatar's Ras Laffan natural gas hubIn response to Khera's remarks, Shashi Tharoor posted a report regarding the issue of the safety of Indian seafarers being raised during the Modi-Trump meeting.The Congress MP also posted a summary from Google's AI tool Gemini regarding the meeting, which stated that the incident in which three Indian seafarers were killed in a US attack in the Gulf of Oman was raised."I read widely and retain what I read. I have never in my life been accused of misrepresenting or distorting any facts or statements, and I stand by my summary of what I read in the print media bout these remarks, which were reportedly made when our PM was seated next to Trump," Tharoor added.The Congress leader further accused the party of being "interested in scoring political points rather than addressing the concern" of Indians losing their lives in the US-Iran war.