Senior Congress Shashi Tharoor who won from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency for the fourth straight term said that he doesn't see himself contesting another Lok Sabha elections. jiliko

Tharoor said he believes that one should know when to step aside for the younger generations to step in.

The senior Congress leader beat Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar by a margin of 16,077 votes to mark his fourth victory from the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat.

He said it is not his final performance in the electoral politics but certainly in Lok Sabha. "I think I have done my bit and I honestly feel that at some point, we all need to know when to step aside for younger blood to come in and have a crack at it," Tharoor told news agency PTI.

Noting that the Lower House of the Parliament though is a very important institution, there are many ways of serving in public life without necessarily having to do it this way.

"I think if the election is five years from hence, I don't really see myself at that stage wanting to have another go at the Lok Sabha," the former Union minister said.

However, bringing the attention back to the present, Tharoor said that there are five years and he is committed towards doing his best for the people he represents during this period.

Talking about the tough contest he witnessed from his constituency from the Left as well, Tharoor said that CPI candidate Pannyan Raveendran secured 2.5 lakh votes.

"But the other is the three areas that are represented by the CPI(M), the CPI candidate came last and the BJP candidate came first. There are some legitimate questions being asked as to how exactly and why exactly that happened," the senior Congress leader said.

But at the end of the day, he said, a victory is a victory and it is being savoured as sweet.

He also that the BJP candidate Suresh Gopi's win from the Thrissur Lok Sabha seat, that too by a huge margin, should be taken seriously given that this is the first time a seat in the state has fallen in the party's kitty.

"But I must say Suresh Gopi, whom I know well and he supported me in 2009 is not a typical BJP candidate. He went out of his way to declare his secular credentials, appealed overtly to the minority voters in Thrissur particularly to the Christian community, and had this personal quality of being a celebrity candidate, a well regarded movie star as well as the host of the Malayalam edition of the Kaun Banega Crorepati," Tharoor said.

He said that all these things make Gopi an "unusual figure" and that too something which cannot be replicated elsewhere easily.

"Certainly if the BJP is going to abandon its communal message and go for the kind of secular campaign that Gopi led, perhaps they might do better but right now they have just gone from being a 13 per cent party in keral to a 16 per cent party in Kerala," Tharoor said.

Notably, Tharoor has also been batting for Rahul Gandhi for the position of the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, terming him to be the "man of the match" of the 2024 general elections.

The Congress bagged 99 seats in this Lok Sabha elections, making a massive jump from its 52 seats tally of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

(With PTI inputs)jiliko

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