Shashi Tharoor clarifies selfie with Mimi, Nusrat and other women MPs after backlash
Shashi Tharoor said the selfie was posted on Twitter at the suggestion of the women MPs who posed for the photo and he was happy to be roped in to this show of workplace camaraderie.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on the first day of the winter session of Parliament invited criticism after he posted a selfie with six women MPs of Parliament, including Trinamool's Nusrat Jahan and Mimi Chakraborty, Congress's Preneet Kaur, wife of former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, NCP's Supriya Sule and Congress's Jothiman Sennimalai and DMK's Thamizhachi Thangapandian. What led to a row over the photo was the caption that Tharoor used. "Who says the Lok Sabha isn't an attractive place to work?" Tharoor wrote as he posted the photo.
Accused of sexism, the Congress MP clarified that it was the initiative of the women MPs in the photo and they, as Tharoor said, asked Tharoor to tweet about the photo. "I am sorry some people are offended but I was happy to be roped in to this show of workplace camaraderie. That's all this is," the Thiruvananthapuram MP tweeted.
As clear in the photo, the selfie was taken by Mimi Chakraborty while the rest posed happily for the selfie with Tharoor in the middle of them. The women MPs also shared Throor's post about ‘attractive place to work’ on their social media handles.
"The whole selfie thing was done (at the women MPs' initiative) in great good humour & it was they who asked me to tweet it in the same spirit," Tharoor wrote.
Supreme Court lawyer Karuna Nandy exclaimed on social media that someone like Shashi Tharoor would "reduce elected political leaders to their looks, and centre himself in the comment to boot." "This is 2021, folks," Nandy wrote. After Shashi Tharoor's apologies and clarification, Nandy wrote the intent of the selfie is not the point. "It minimises women in politics or aspiring to politics, Dr Tharoor, and seems to make attractiveness the criteria."
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