Kummanam Rajasekharan's resignation as Mizoram governor brings in clarity about the contest for the prestigious Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency.
Tharoor is eyeing a hat-trick of wins. The onus of dashing Shashi Tharoor's hopes will now rest on Kummanam as the BJP candidate and C Divakaran of the CPI. Tharoor could just manage to scrape through after a scare in 2014.
BJP leader O Rajagopal had put up a tough fight riding on the Modi wave of 2014, but Tharoor turned the tables in the last rounds of counting.
Certain booths in the coastal belt of the constituency voted en masse to Tharoor, paving the way for his win by a narrow margin of just 15,000 votes.
In that election, Tharoor was hounded by allegations surrounding the demise of his wife Sunanda Pushkar.
Also, the mood of the electorate across the country was anti-Congress, mostly due to the failure of the second UPA government on various counts.
The ruling dispensation in the state was also Congress oriented. Tharoor actually surmounted these giant odds to become one of the 40-odd lawmakers of the Congress in the Lok Sabha.
This time, there is no incumbency factor to drag Tharoor as the BJP is in power. The Congress is also not at the helm of the state government.
This essentially means that it would be a difficult task to oust Tharoor this time around for the BJP.
But Kummanam remains the best bet for the saffron party to attempt that task.
That is why the BJP leadership decided to ask him to quit the gubernatorial post in Mizoram to put up a political fight in the constituency, which has elected both the LDF and UDF candidates, but not the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
But slowly the tide turned and Rajagopal went on to beat CPM's V Sivankutty in Nemom constituency in the last assembly polls.
The CPM alleged a tacit help from the Congress-led UDF to give BJP its first legislator in the state by putting up a weak candidate in Nemom.
But it is a fact that the BJP had made inroads into LDF and UDF votes in Thiruvananthapuram.
The BJP emerged as the second-largest party in Thiruvananthapuram Corporation elections bagging 33 seats and relegating the UDF to the third position.
This should be the Congress' main worry – Its organisational structure is in a shambles. It has to get its act together to pull off a hat-trick of wins.
The CPI has been dogged by allegations of making Thiruvananthapuram a payment seat last time.
And C Divakaran, who is set to become its candidate now, was at the centre of that controversy.
That does not augur well for the CPI, which was relegated to the third place in 2014.
With BJP at a not so enviable position at the centre, Kummanam will have to tap votes outside the party's core base to upset Tharoor.
That is easier said than done, but Tharoor also cannot expect an easy ride given the Congress' organisational flaws and inability to tap into the perceived Sabarimala discontent brewing against the LDF government.
