When Rajeev Chandrasekhar was named the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate for Thiruvananthapuram in last year’s Lok Sabha polls, the general murmur was that they’d found a candidate who had the sort of qualities that made Shashi Tharoor, the Congress incumbent, popular among the masses. Both, it was observed, could draw the ‘upper class’ voters of Thiruvananthapuram with their sophisticated ways, their privileged caste locations, their foreign university education, and their English-speaking skills. Even though Pannyan Raveendran, the third prominent candidate fielded by the Left, brushed off this theory, the comparisons kept floating around. Rajeev’s victory was predicted by pre-poll surveys and until the final hours of the counting day, he had kept a lead over Tharoor, losing in the end only by 16,077 votes.
After a little bit of drama about drawing curtains on his “public life,” Rajeev remerged in the political scene with visits to Thiruvananthapuram last year and sprung a bit of a surprise this weekend by taking up the highest post of the party in the state. On Sunday, March 23, days after speculations of him being named party president of Kerala, news came out that he would be officially placed in the post on Monday. Pictures of him handing over the nomination papers, alongside his predecessor K Surendran, were posted by BJP Keralam’s official page on X. On Monday morning, Union Minister Prahlad Joshi, in charge of Kerala's party organisation, announced that Rajeev was unanimously chosen for the post.
A year ago, when Rajeev began his campaign to be elected Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, he had not, it was noted, used a communal line like other BJP leaders before him. This was markedly different from the line that he took in October 2023, making polarising remarks in the aftermath of the Kalamassery blasts at a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses. His comments led to two police cases including charges of provocation with intent to cause riot and promoting enmity between religious groups. Rajeev had in his social media pages said that Kerala was paying the price for shameless appeasement politics, and added that "Terrorist Hamas for jihad are causing attacks and bomb blasts on innocent Christians." While this might be construed to be in line with the BJP's attempts to appeal to Christian voters, it had exposed another side of Rajeev, one that he will steer clear of for the election campaign of 2024.
During his campaign, he stuck to promises of development, a line the BJP had chosen in its 2014 election campaign, claiming that the Gujarat governance led by Narendra Modi had been a success and that it would be replicated across the country. Modi became Prime Minister for the first time that year and reclaimed the top post in 2019 and 2024. In a state like Kerala, where the BJP had never won a Lok Sabha seat before 2024, it seemed unwise to wield the Hindutva card that the party had sown and grown in the rest of the country. Rajeev followed in the footsteps of the Prime Minister, waxing eloquent on skill development and technology, and, inevitably, became dubbed as Modi’s man.
He could substantiate his interest in development, having put himself on the path of technology from the 80s, switching from his electrical engineering background to computer science and coding. Famously, he joined the BPL Foundation founded by his father-in-law TPG Nambiar, and created the first mobile phone service company in 1994. Although his father-in-law would later take him to court over ownership issues and Rajeev would later sell the company, his name would be imprinted among technocrats in India who made a difference. In 2006, he would also associate himself with the media, becoming a major shareholder of Asianet, but claim not to interfere in the editorial functioning of the news channel. He’d start Jupiter, a financial firm, around the same time he plunged into politics. Between 2006 and 2024, he maintained his parliamentary post in the Rajya Sabha as an independent from Karnataka till 2018 and a BJP man from then on. He was rewarded with a ministerial post – Union Minister of State – in the second Modi government for three years.
But in 2024, after his failure to change the history of the BJP never winning in Thiruvananthapuram, Rajeev was dropped from the list of ministers of state. It was left to a less probable candidate – Suresh Gopi, the celebrity candidate that the BJP chose for Thrissur – to do what no other party member could so far – win a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala and by a huge margin of 74,686 votes. Rajeev’s loss, after so much hype and celebrity support (actor Shobana among them) and splurging an allegedly big amount of money, came as a huge letdown. A controversy arose after his affidavit surfaced and it showed that in one of the financial years, his taxable income was a mere Rs 680. Words were thrown between Tharoor and Rajeev, leading the latter to file a defamation case about an alleged statement that he was bribing voters in Thiruvananthapuram. A Delhi court dismissed the plea in February this year.
Rajeev’s admission that he could not vote in Thiruvananthapuram for the 2024 election, as he was unable to transfer his vote from Karnataka, also did not bode well. After the election, he said he was disappointed that the voters of Thiruvananthapuram had not chosen him, but he must have nursed hopes of regaining his ministerial seat, for soon after the lists were put out and his name was not there, a controversial tweet came from his account. He was ending his public life, he said, and strangely, added a laugh-aloud smiley with it. The post was pulled down after it brought too much attention, and the blame for it went to an “intern” handling his account.
After a more-or-less quiet period, Rajeev’s name began appearing in headlines again last week when he dropped hints of being in the race to be state president. The takeaway from it, however, was that the party needed a change of leadership in Kerala. Multiple state heads before him had inadvertently become reasons for humiliating news stories – PS Sreedharan Pillai for his controversial statements during the Sabarimala women’s entry of 2018, Kummanam Rajasekharan for his uninvited presence in the Kochi metro, leading mischief makers on the internet to coin the ‘kummanadi’ emoji, K Surendran for his repeated electoral defeats and a dramatic show at Sabarimala in 2018, and the veteran O Rajagopal for blurting out the ‘electoral adjustments’ between political parties to defeat the Left. Placing the technocrat, whose decades of entrepreneurial experience guaranteed communicative skills, in the coveted post, the party may be hoping for more by way of electoral results and less by way of blundering leaders.
