In the summer of 2009, when Shashi Tharoor had landed in Thiruvananthapuram lok Sabha constituency as the Congress candidate, he was the aristocrat on the scene, glittering with the glamour of being a just-retired international diplomat and well-educated, well-behaved gentleman.
That gentleness of the Union Minister is still intact to an extent despite the problems he has been going through of late, but even Congress leaders in Thiruvananthapuram now say that he is not the glamour boy he used to be in 2009. “It is certain now that he will have to work harder this time if he has to make it,” said a Congress leader campaigning for him.
Tharoor, who was “parachuted” by the national Congress leadership into Thiruvananthapuram in the 2009 election, had won the seat by a margin of 99,998 votes over his main rival of the CPI, P Ramachandran Nair, who scored 2,26,727 votes. PK Krishnadas of the BJP, which had bagged 2,28,052 votes here in 2004, had to be satisfied with 84,094 votes.
It is obvious that it is not just the mysterious death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar that is haunting him on the campaign scene now though the CPI(M)-led lDF is trying to keep it in focus by all means. Unlike most other sitting MPs from Kerala, he is viewed by the electorate as a representative of the UPA which is facing a tough time on the national level.
Added to this is the burden he carries on his shoulders in the form of the allegations he had to face in connection with the IPl controversy and other issues. However, observers say that Tharoor still has the charm to win from Thiruvananthapuram, a constituency where his kind of personality matters a lot.
The good news for Tharoor is that his main rival, Dr Bennet J Abraham of the lDF, is also facing allegations with regard to his earlier connections with a self-financing medical college. There are even allegations that Bennet Abraham had become the left candidate on “payment nomination”.
Belonging to the Church of South India, Bennet Abraham is the left Independent candidate nominated by the CPI , whose youth outfit the AIYF and student front the AISF had led several agitations against the medical college in Karakkonam, Thiruvananthapuram of which he was a director.
However, the left banks on his popularity as a physician, educator and as a man liked very much inside his community. “In a constituency like Thiruvananthapuram which has a lot of backward voters also, this hope need not be barren. However, there is a lot of dissatisfaction in a section of the left in Bennet’s nomination,” says senior journalist Sreeraj.
“But I feel the surprise this time will come from the BJP’s side,” Sreeraj says. “I think the Congress and the left are being hypocritical in showing no concern about the appeal of BJP candidate O Rajagopal, particularly in the contest of the nation-wide :wave” set off by the selection by NDA of Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate,” he adds.
In the 2004 election, Rajagopal had stunned the Congress and the left by bagging 29.86 percent of the total polled votes in Thiruvananthapuram when the vote-share of Congress’s glamour man VS Sivakumar, who claimed the second position, was just 30.30 percent. The difference between the votes of winner PK Vasudevan Nair of the CPI and Rajagopal then was just 48.005.
The BJP believes that Rajagopal can cover such a difference this time, aided by the Modi wave and the general feeling in the electorate that the Congress and the left may join hands when they reach Delhi.
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