Kummanam Rajasekharan quits as Mizoram governor, may fight Lok Sabha polls against Shashi Tharoor

Mizoram governor Kummanam Rajasekharan resigned from his post on Friday and is set to fight for election to the Lok Sabha as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency, which has twice elected the Congress’s Shashi Tharoor to the House.

An official communique from the President’s office said Rajasekharan’s resignation had been accepted and Assam governor Jagdish Mukhi would hold additional charge of Mizoram.

Rajasekharan’s resignation came just nine months into his stint as governor of Mizoram and followed calls by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and a section of the BJP for the 66-year-old to be fielded as the party’s candidate from Thiruvananthapuram to give a tough fight to Tharoor and tap Hindu votes over the Sabarimala issue.

The BJP has backed Hindu protests against a September 28 Supreme Court order that allowed women of all ages to worship at the Sabarimala temple, ending a decades-old practice that barred women of childbearing age from entering the shine to Lord Ayyappa, Hindu traditionalists believe the presiding deity is a celibate.

“No doubt our prospects will increase with the entry of Rajasekharan. The party will work hard to win maximum seats from Kerala,” said state BJP president P S Sreedharan Pillai.

The Congress downplayed his imminent re-entry into politics, saying no one could beat Tharoor’s popularity in the state capital. Rajasekharan was not available for comment, but people close to him said on condition of anonymity that he would reach the state later Friday night and plunge into active politics again.

The BJP is trying to emerge as a potential political force in Kerala, which has tended to alternate between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the Left Democratic Front, by using the emotive Sabarimala issue.

It has shortlisted five Lok Sabha seats in the state to contest in the upcoming general election, and one of them is Thiruvananthapuram. In the 2014 election in , BJP candidate O Rajagopal gave a tough fight to Tharoor, who managed to retain Thiruvananthapuram with a slender margin of 15,000 votes.