Kerala: How Shashi Tharoor’s victory in 2014 silenced his critics

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Sunanda Pushkar death case had cast a shadow on the political life of Shashi Tharoor. This was reflected when there was a campaign against him contesting the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Thiruvananthapuram. Even though he was not favoured by the state leadership then, the party high command stood with Tharoor.
However, Tharoor had to sweat it out against BJP’s O Rajagopal in that election. Political pundits had predicted that the women voters would drift away from Tharoor owing to Pushkar’s death. There were also reports that the party machinery was defunct during the campaign. Tharoor’s winning margin also came down from a staggering 99,998 votes in 2009 to a mere 14,501 in 2014. However, this victory helped silence Tharoor’s political critics.

Tharoor had started to come out of this negative campaign gradually and the consecutive second victory to the LS polls played a major role in that. But it was the BJP government at the Centre that came to power in 2014 that made things worse for him once again.
“BJP was engaged in a personal vendetta against Tharoor. He was haunted by BJP for the last seven years by raising this issue. Even the LDF had raised the death of his wife as a major campaign issue during the elections then. Both BJP and CPM should apologize to Tharoor,” said K Sudhakaran, KPCC president.
Despite all campaigns against him, the high command stood by him is reflected in the fact that he was given the charge of preparing the party’s manifesto in the recent assembly polls.