Congress leaders in Kerala still do not know who had proposed Shashi Tharoor’s name for candidature in Thiruvananthapuram in 2009. Similarly, they have no idea as to who re-nominated him for the 2014 election. But they do not care. They are happy with the hope that he will win the seat for the party and the UDF it leads this time also.
But the picture in the constituency is not very rosy, even Tharoor’s own campaign managers admit in secret. With his foreign-made sunglasses, spotless white Kurta-Dhoti, outlandish Malayalam and the image of Kerala’s global son, Tharoor was a phenomenon in Thiruvananthapuram in 2009. Not anymore.
People, especially woman voters, are asking questions. Weekly afternoon meetings of women’s self-help groups are witnessing discussions on the sidelines on how Tharoor’s wife Sunanda Pushkar had died. There are even cruel comments like “I hear that he had married thrice. Now he can get married for a fourth time.”
Congressmen campaigning for Tharoor are spending a lot of time explaining his innocence in the case of his wife’s death. The discussions are so discomforting that he was last week forced to make Sunanda’s family members issue a release absolving him of any role in her death.
Fully aware of the difficult situation he is facing due to his personal tragedy and several controversies that came up in the past five years, Shashi has made the development he had brought to the constituency the hinge of his campaign.
Irrespective of how he was parachuted into the Thiruvananthapuram — a constituency riddled with difficult community equations — as the Congress candidate, Shashi did a wonder job there in 2009 by wresting the seat from the lDF by defeating CPI rival by margin of 99,998 votes.
“In a sense, Tharoor then was the symbol of everything that the middle class voter of Thiruvananthapuram would yearn to be. His aristocratic background and mannerism appealed to them well. To a section of the poor voters, he looked like the man who could help them in a big way,” says Ajay Kumar, a Thiruvananthapuram-based sociologist. “But that need not be the case now despite the fact that many opinion polls have predicted victory for him. The glamour man of that election is now facing a tough triangular contest. Survival is not that easy,” adds Ajay Kumar.
Dr J Bennet Abraham, the Independent candidate CPI has fielded for the lDF, comes from the Nadar community, the support of which is the key to success for any candidate. That is bound to have a negative effect on the votes Shashi had bagged from that section in 2009, according to observers though the Congress is trying to trivialize Bennet’s candidature.
At the same time, BJP’s O Rajagopal, who had bagged 29.8 percent votes when winner PK Vasudevean Nair had got only 37.45 percent votes, is there as a formidable challenge to Tharoor. In the context of the Narendra Modi wave in the national level and Rajagopal’s own personal appeal, at least one survey has predicted victory for the BJP candidate in Thiruvananthapuram.
The second largest community in Thiruvananthapuram is perhaps the Nairs, Hindu upper caste, to which both Tharoor and Rajagopal belong. Another crucial factor will be how the 145,409 new voters in Thiruvananthapuram are going to vote amidst the changes taking place in the thinking of the new generation.
“Also, Tharoor will have to view with seriousness the presence of Ajit Joy (a former IPS man) as the AAP candidate in the changed situation in a seat like this,” cautions Ajith Kumar, a history lecturer. “It is crucial that the candidates have got just six more days for all trial-and-error acts as campaigning has to end on April 8,” he adds.