Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor kisses a boy during an election campaign in Thiruvananthapuram yesterday.
By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor is the most educated candidate while media baron Veerendra Kumar is the richest in Kerala.
Tharoor, the Congress candidate from Thiruvananthapuram, holds a postgraduate degree in law and diplomacy, and a PhD while his principal opponent fielded by the Left Democratic Front (LDF), Bennet Abraham, is a medical doctor.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s O Rajagopal, 84, who is also in the fray from the state capital, is the eldest among the 386 candidates in the state. He is a graduate in law from Madras Law College.
Kumar, who heads the Socialist Janata (Democratic), an ally of the ruling Congress, has a fortune of Rs420mn, including his stake in the Mathrubhumi media group. An award winning writer in Malayalam, he holds a masters in business administration from the Cincinnati University in the US.
There are 24 “crorepatis” whose wealth exceeds Rs10mn and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) has a slight edge over the LDF rivals led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The youngest of the candidates, the Congress Party’s 32-year-old Dean Kuriakose (Idukki), a lawyer, is also the poorest among them with total assets worth Rs314,050 against liabilities of Rs411,719 on bank loans.
With total assets worth Rs230mn, Tharoor, a former UN undersecretary general and author of more than a dozen books in English, is also the second richest candidate followed by former Time and CNN journalist Anita Pratap of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) whose wealth is estimated at Rs190.9mn.
The fourth, fifth and sixth positions are held by independent candidates fielded by the LDF - Congress rebel V Abdurrahman (Rs56.8mn) in Ponnani, film actor Innocent (Rs48mn) in Chalakudi and former top bureaucrat Christy Fernandez (Rs37.1mn) in Ernakulam.
The AAP’s candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, Ajit Joy, a former police officer who had also worked at the UN, has declared assets worth Rs37.1mn. He has a Masters from Harvard Law School.
Others on the list are M I Shahnavas (Wayanad), P C Chacko (Thrissur), Jose K Mani (Kottayam), C N Jayadevan (Thrissur), K V Thomas (Ernakulam), K P Dhanapalan (Thrissur), N K Premachandran (Kollam), A Sampath (Attingal), Joyce George (Idukki), K C Venugopal (Alappuzha), Kodikkunnil Suresh (Mavelikkara), P K Shreemathi and K Sudhakaran (Kannur), E Ahamed (Malappuram) and E T Mohamed Basheer (Ponnani), in the descending order.
Besides the AAP and BJP, fringe groups like the Welfare Party of India (WFI) of the Jama’at-e-Islami and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) of the Popular Front of India (PFI) are also in the fray with a high-voltage campaigning.
The Revolutionary Marxist Party (RMP) founded by the slain Marxist leader T P Chandrasekharan, which has fielded candidates in 14 constituencies, is supporting the Socialist Unity Centre (SUCI) and independents in other constituencies.
Mayavati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, Udhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Socialist Republican Party, Indian Gandhian Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Red Flag and Republican Party of India (RPI) have also fielded their candidates.
