Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday said if the next Lok Sabha election takes place five years down the line, he does not see himself contesting it as he believes that one needs to know when to step aside for younger leaders to come in.
In Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat, Mr. Tharoor beat Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar by 16,077 votes to register his fourth straight victory from the constituency.
Asked if this election was his ‘electoral politics swansong’, Tharoor told PTI, “Not electoral politics, but certainly Lok Sabha. I think I have done my bit and I honestly feel that at some point, we all need to know when to step aside for younger blood to come in and have a crack at it.”
“The Lok Sabha is certainly a very important institution. I have done my very best for my constituents and I will continue doing so but there are ways of serving in public life without necessarily having to do it that way. I think if the election is five years from hence, I don’t really see myself at that stage wanting to have another go at the Lok Sabha,” the former Union Minister said.
Mr. Tharoor said for now there are five years to serve, and he is determined to do his best for the people.
Asked about the close fight and if the Left made it difficult for him, Mr. Tharoor said the CPI candidate Pannyan Raveendran got 2.5 lakh votes. “But the other is the three areas that are represented by the CPI(M), the CPI candidate came last and the BJP candidate came first. There are some legitimate questions being asked as to how exactly and why exactly that happened. But you know at the end of the day, a victory is a victory, and we are savouring it as sweet,” Mr. Tharoor said.
On the BJP bagging its first seat in Kerala with actor-politician Suresh Gopi winning the Thrissur seat by a huge margin, Mr. Tharoor said it needs to be taken seriously. “But I must say Suresh Gopi, whom I know well and he supported me in 2009, is not a typical BJP candidate. He went out of his way to declare his secular credentials, appealed overtly to the minority voters in Thrissur particularly to the Christian community, and had this personal quality of being a celebrity candidate, a well-regarded movie star as well as the host of the Malayalam edition of the Kaun Banega Crorepati,” Mr. Tharoor said.
“All of these make him a very unusual figure and it may not be that easily replicable elsewhere. Certainly, if the BJP is going to abandon its communal message and go for the kind of secular campaign that Gopi led, perhaps they might do better but right now they have just gone from being a 13% party in Kerala to a 16% party in Kerala,” he said.
