Tharoor says removal of Raihan Vadra’s photos 'one more nail'

• Tharoor condemns removal of Raihan Vadra’s photographs as petty and damaging to India’s global image.

• He questions objections to photographs documenting protests and featuring the national flag.

• Bikaner House says the removed photographs were inconsistent with its policy, while Raihan plans to display the full collection elsewhere. 

Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday, 23 October termed the removal of photographs from Raihan Vadra’s exhibition at Bikaner House ‘petty’, saying the move had cast a shadow on India’s reputation as a democracy that protects freedom of expression.

Visiting the exhibition in Delhi, Tharoor said the decision to remove photographs of recent protests was disappointing and questioned why an art exhibition should be treated as a source of political agitation.

“The Bikaner House was supposed to be a place of art and culture, and to be very honest, people don’t come to look at photographs out of any sense of political agitation. This is not a place where anyone is going to start shouting slogans; they come to see an artist’s eye, something he has framed,” the Thiruvananthapuram MP told PTI Videos.

Tharoor said the sight of blank walls was distressing. One wall, he pointed out, was meant to display photographs of protests alongside the Preamble to the Constitution, which remains painted on the wall.

“So, the Preamble is there but the photographs are gone,” he said, questioning the mentality of those who feared the public seeing the images.

Tharoor praised Raihan, son of Congress MP and general-secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and businessman Robert Vadra, for his photographic talent, singling out his wildlife pictures as ‘absolutely special’. He also said the controversy had brought the young photographer’s work to a much wider audience.

“Finally, I would say to those who took these absolutely petty decisions that they have actually done him a favour because now the entire country knows about this exhibition,” he said.

The Congress leader described the removal of a photograph featuring the national flag as ‘utterly shocking’, arguing that the flag and the Constitution should not be treated as objectionable.

“Just as they can’t deface the Preamble of the Constitution, they have no right to deface the flag,” he said, calling the decision an unfortunate combination of pettiness, heavy-handedness and ‘stupidity’.

Tharoor said the episode was damaging to India’s international standing. “It was the kind of decision that casts a shadow on our reputation as a land of democracy, as a country that protects freedom of expression and that values creative expression,” he said.

Earlier, in a post on X, Tharoor had called the Bikaner House administration’s decision a ‘disgrace’ on several levels. He argued that photographs documenting protests were depictions of events, not political statements in themselves, and said the images would likely have been permissible had the issue been tested in court.

‘And worst of all, this censorship has driven one more nail into the coffin of India’s global reputation as a freedom-loving democracy,’ he wrote.

Tharoor added that the controversy had probably brought the exhibition to a much larger audience than it would otherwise have reached, thanking the officials responsible for giving Raihan’s photographic career a ‘well-deserved boost’.

Raihan had said the Bikaner House administration removed several photographs of recent Delhi protests ahead of his solo exhibition. The Bikaner House Society said it had sought the removal of certain pictures after finding them inconsistent with its policy.

In an apparent swipe at the Modi government, Priyanka Gandhi said on Thursday that when someone in power becomes afraid of another person’s expression, they may not realise that they have already lost the very power they are trying to protect.