News Reader.info

After 15 years of representing Thiruvananthapuram in the Lok Sabha Shashi Tharoor has for the fourth consecutive time won the seat, defeating his nearest rival Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a

sitting Union minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet by a margin of 16,077 votes. Communist Party of India’s Pannyan Raveendran was relegated to the third place in a high-voltage

contest. Tharoor’s victory became certain only in the second half of the day, with Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Rajeev Chandrasekhar leading the race in the morning for hours. At one

point, Chandrasekhar had a lead of over 20,000 votes over Tharoor, whose leads began to accrue only in the last few rounds of counting. Tharoor won 358155 votes and Chandrasekhar 342078

votes, while Pannyan came in third place with 247648 votes.  The tight contest was reminiscent of the 2014 elections when O Rajagopal of the BJP had the lead in the earlier half of the day,

but Tharoor ended up winning with a relatively small majority of over 15,000 votes. However, in the 2019 elections he gained the nearly one lakh majority he had in the 2009 elections,

beating Kummanam Rajasekharan of the BJP.  By late afternoon, when his victory became certain, Shashi Tharoor said that Thiruvananthapuram was one of the few constituencies that the BJP had

concentrated on in Kerala. "They invested a lot in these constituencies, which included Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram. We should measure the victory margin of Thiruvananthapuram, by

taking into account the majority with which they won Thrissur (where BJP's Suresh Gopi won by over 74,000 votes). They could do it in one place. But we could stop them in other because

of the people in Thiruvananthapuram, because of their big-heartedness, their values and beliefs." The electoral contest for the capital city of Thiruvananthapuram was one of the most

keenly watched fights in Kerala for being one of the constituencies where the BJP, which had never won a seat from Kerala before, launched a campaign blitzkrieg with a sitting Union

minister. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself flew down to the capital for multiple roadshows for candidates in Thiruvananthapuram and nearby Attingal, where another Union minister V

Muralidharan was in fray and the party left no stones unturned in its attempt to conquer the constituency that had been giving it hope for years.  Tharoor had won the constituency in 2019

with a margin of more than one lakh over his nearest rival Kummanam Rajasekharan of the BJP. CPI's C Divakaran garnered close to 2.58 lakh votes. In the 2014 elections that brought

Narendra Modi to power, the BJP’s candidate in Thiruvananthapuram O Rajagopal had given a tight contest to Shashi Tharoor. His vote share had diminished but Tharoor votes soared in 2019.

BJP’s electoral comfort so far is Rajagopal’s win from Nemom, an assembly seat that comes under the Thiruvananthapuram constituency.  With Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s entry into the fray this

year, the campaign suddenly rose to new levels, big hoardings and election offices of the BJP candidate springing up in all parts of the city. Soon enough, cash-for-vote allegations also

rose against him, for which a legal tussle ensued between Chandrasekhar and Tharoor.