Thiruvananthapuram, Mar 16 (PTI) The fight is already set in Thiruvananthapuram, one of the 20 Parliament constituencies in Kerala, which is considered the political nerve centre of the state.
Shashi Tharoor, a stalwart of the United Democratic Front (UDF), is vying for his fourth consecutive term representing his constituency. The election is scheduled on April 26.
Tharoor faces formidable opposition from Rajeev Chandrasekhar of the NDA, known for his expertise in technology and politics, as well as Pannian Raveendran of the LDF, a champion of the common man known for his soft-spoken demeanour.
Raveendran previously served as the constituency’s representative in a 2005 by-election following the demise of the incumbent MP, P K Vasudevan Nair, also from the LDF.
The fight is between two highly-articulate, foreign-educated, flamboyant candidates of the UDF and NDA and the local leader, who hits the streets with a common man’s demeanor.
Thiruvananthapuram has always been shifting its allegiance between the UDF and LDF as both parties managed to win seats for equal terms in past elections.
However, after Tharoor started contesting from the seat, with his ‘Global Citizen’ and the god-fearing, temple-going, believer images, the rivals had little chance of regaining the seat.
Tharoor, however, had to sweat it out in the 2014 general elections, when he saw a deep decline in his margin compared to the 2009 victory. In 2014, Tharoor managed to scrape through with a meagre margin of about 16,000 votes to his rival candidate, O Rajagopal of the NDA, when the BJP-led alliance managed to secure a second position in the constituency for the first time.
However, five years later, the Congress leader managed to bring back his days of glory with a victory by a margin of nearly one lakh votes against the second-place finisher, Kummanam Rajasekharan of the NDA.
The NDA is mainly eyeing the majority Hindu votes in the constituency, which comes to around 76.8 percent of the voter list as per the 2019 election statistics.
Both LDF and UDF are focussing on the Hindu majority votes and, at the same time, are also looking to tap into the Christian (14 percent) and Muslim (9.1 percent) votes in the constituency that may get consolidated against the BJP.
Thiruvananthapuram has a majority of urban voters, and past voting patterns show that there is a considerable number of neutral voters who vote based on the capacity of the candidate over political affiliations. Tharoor rides on the hope that his global image will help him win the constituency for the fourth time.
The NDA, on the other hand, is trying to cash in on the ‘non-performance’ of the three term MP and trying to woo the urban elitists and neutral voters with the foreign educated Chandrasekhar.
NDA’s candidate selection was done with the utmost care, as the BJP wanted a candidate who could take on Tharoor in full steam.
Raveendran, on the other hand, hopes his work as an MP for the constituency during the 2005–2009 period will help him and that the people will reject both the UDF and NDA candidates this time.
The elections this year will be mostly dependent on the swing in neutral votes and also on how the minority coastal Christian belt and Muslim voters decide to vote. PTI KPK TGB SA
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