Rajeev Chandrashekhar For Thiruvananthapuram Is A Mirror To Shashi Tharoor

Thiruvananthapuram parliamentary constituency in southernmost Kerala has been a perennial contender for the title of ‘the prettiest seat in the country’.

It is flanked to the west by stunning Kovalam beach, and to the east, by the verdant mist-shrouded ridges of the Cardamom Hills.

It attracts visitors in droves — officials, by virtue of being the state capital, tourists, and, interestingly, electoral candidates from out of town. V K Krishna Menon, our infamous defence minister during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, who hails from North Malabar, won from here in the 1971 general elections as an independent.

But the 2024 elections take the cake: none of the three candidates are locals. They are not even from Travancore.

Marxist candidate Pannian Ravindran, a long-haired ideologue who won this seat in a 2005 byelection, is from Kannur in North Kerala, 510 kilometres away.

Shashi Tharoor of the Congress, who has been representing Thiruvananthapuram seat since 2009, and might be the party’s candidate in 2024 as well, actually hails from Kochi-Malabar.

And the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Rajeev Chandrashekhar’s roots are in a tiny village called Deshamangalam, on the banks of the Bharata River, north of Thrissur in Kochi. 

It is going to be a tight triangular contest, filled with vitriol and desperation in Marxist and Congress ranks, and a nothing-to-lose carpet bombing approach by the BJP. We can even visualise how the words will fly.

Tharoor will campaign in his grating ‘Konkani’ Malayalam (that’s what locals disparagingly call Malayalees who can’t speak the lingo properly) about the merits of secularism, the grave dangers of fascism, and the glory that was the Nehruvian era. 

We can expect the odd personal barbs against Chandrashekhar, couched, of course, in a propah Oxbridge accent which, however, wilts at the sight of a ‘w’ (for all his polish, Tharoor tends to lapse into pronouncing words starting with a ‘w’ as ‘v’, as most Indians do, especially when he is in a hurry, or is harried). But for his victory, Tharoor will depend only, and only, on the Muslim and Christian votes, as always.

Comrade Ravindran’s campaign will be low key, and entirely in the vernacular. His job: to split the Hindu vote, rally his loyal cadres, collect as much of the Christian vote as his ally Jose K Mani can supply, and trawl his nets for the disaffected Muslim vote (there is serious flux within the Muslim League, a key Congress ally, and it could be a sizeable chunk).

He will also be severely hamstrung by the political fallout of a recent ghastly incident in Kerala, in which a student was brutally beaten and killed, allegedly by members of the Marxists’ Student Federation of India (SFI).

Against this, Chandrashekhar’s sole ace will be the mirror he holds up to Tharoor, the consummate ultracrepidarian, and locals will be watching.

(Ultracrepidarianism is a portmanteau which means trying to pass high opinion, in an apparently-knowledgeable manner, on matters you actually know nothing about; Tharoor has been hilariously called out earlier by Swarajya for this tendency).

For every statement Tharoor makes, be it on policy or politics, Chandrashekhar will show that it is bereft of substance.

Thus, if Tharoor bleats his usual litany of minority victimhood, the BJP candidate’s response will be two-fold: first, that it is precisely this alarmism which perpetuates Muslim cultural separatism to still cleave our society; and, second, posh vocabularies notwithstanding, that Tharoor will not be able to point one single act of policy or administration by the Narendra Modi government in the past decade, which differentiates the citizenry on the basis of creed.

If Tharoor is bold enough to talk about economics or development during the campaign (he rarely does), Chandrashekhar will contrast the nation’s abject fiscal plight during not just that long and painful decade when Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister, but earlier Congress governments as well, with the remarkable material progress in India since May 2014.

Woe betide a Tharoor who claims that Rajiv Gandhi instituted a computer revolution in India in the 1980s, since the stinging retort will be that anyone can bankrupt the treasury by blindly importing goods without end; that requires no special political skill, save one which pays no heed to domestic manufacturing or fiscal prudence.

On the contrary, it is only now, a full forty years too late, that the Indian government has finally embarked on a massive effort to make this country a major manufacturer of microchips by the end of the decade (incidentally under Chandrashekhar’s savvy ministership).

In effect, Chandrashekhar will demonstrate that the Congress stands quite literally for nothing, and, that the Communist epigones of Che Guevara and Lenin are good only for cutting the BJP’s votes in the state capital.

It is the only favour the Communists will be doing to their so-called ally, the Congress, in Kerala.

How all that translates into votes in Thiruvanathapuram is another matter, yet at the end of this campaign, Chandrashekhar will confidently hold his head up with pride, while Tharoor will be left gazing into a forlorn mirror of his own party’s making.