People read newspapers displaying headlines of the election victory of Narendra Modi, in Amritsar yesterday.

By Ashraf Padanna/Thiruvananthapuram


With prime minister-designate Narendra Modi lavishing praise on Kerala’s “role” in his Bharatiya Janata Party’s rollercoaster ride to power in New Delhi, rumours are doing the rounds over cabinet representation from the state where the party drew a blank.
In his first address in New Delhi yesterday after the resounding win, Modi, apparently referring to scores of party workers who died in revenge killings with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), dedicated it to the BJP workers in Kerala who laid their life for the party.
“As a person, Modi requests you that the victory not be dedicated to him but to the efforts of lakhs of BJP workers,” he said. “It is dedicated to BJP workers in Kerala who have been murdered over the decades.”
Modi also found time to thank Shashi Tharoor, a Congress leader and a junior minister in the outgoing federal ministry who defeated BJP candidate O Rajagopal by just 14,470 votes, for his congratulatory tweet.
“@ShashiTharoor Many thanks. Congratulations for your victory as well. Lets work together to create a better India!” he wrote on the microblogging site Twitter.
BJP leaders here feel Modi would likely take the Rajya Sabha route to accommodate one or two ministers from Kerala as none of the BJP candidate won the Lok Sabha election from the state.
Three names very much in speculation are “demolition man” Alphons Kannanthanam, “metro man” E Sreedharan and Rajagopal, a two-time junior minister in the previous BJP government headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee though he has lost all the elections he contested from Kerala.
Kannanthanam, the former Delhi Development Authority commissioner who earned the nickname of “demolition man” for razing hundreds of illegal structures and made it into the Time magazine’s list of 100 young global leaders capable of changing the world, is said to be part of Modi’s inner circles as a member of the BJP National Executive.
He resigned as an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the Kerala cadre to take the political plunge as an independent candidate backed by the CPM. The 61-year-old joined the BJP in 2011.
Though he was keen to contest the just concluded elections from Pathanamthitta, the party chose its state unit vice-president M T Ramesh and lost.
Sreedharan, a member of Kerala’s planning panel and adviser to Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on infrastructure projects, was all praise for Modi after he was declared the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, and expressed the hope that he would fasten the government’s decision-making process and development of the country as a whole.
The architect of Delhi Metro who is currently helping to build rapid mass transport systems in his home state, Sreedharan is likely to be accommodated in the railway ministry to plan and execute such projects, including bullet trains, across India.
Rajagopal, 85, on the other hand, has age and experience on his side as junior minister for law and justice, defence technology and railways and he is still remembered for his contributions here.
However, he was elected to the upper house of parliament from Madhya Pradesh to be sworn in as a minister.