Kerala local body polls: Outgoing Mayor Arya Rajendran’s absence from the fray, governance record dominate Thiruvananthapuram Corporation campaign

Outgoing Thiruvananthapuram Corporation Mayor Arya Rajendran is not in the fray for the 2025 local body elections in Kerala. Nevertheless, Ms. Rajendran’s conspicuous absence from the race for the coveted mayoralty and her governance track record continue to have a considerable bearing on the high-octane campaigning for the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation.

The CPI(M)’s surprise decision to upend ageing and established political power structures in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation in 2021 by nominating Ms. Rajendran as Mayor arguably appears to have prompted the Congress and the BJP as well to experiment with comparable dramatic turns in candidate announcement in 2025.

For one, the BJP has fielded former Director General of Police R. Sreelekha from the Sasthamangalam ward, triggering speculation that the ranking former officer is a potential mayoral candidate.

So has the Congress, which chose former MLA K. Sabarinathan to contest from Kowdiar ward, signalling that the former legislator might be the UDF’s mayoral pick.

Lately, political heavyweights have waded into the heated debate about Ms. Rajendran’s governance legacy, whose assumption of office at the age of 21 had hit headlines in 2020, drawn encouraging comments from across the political spectrum, including, surprisingly, from New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who was then a New York State Assembly member. 

For one, senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala quipped that the Left Democratic Front (LDF) would get “a few more votes” if Ms. Rajendran shifted her domicile to Kozhikode.

Mr. Chennithala argued that Ms. Rajendran could make no ripple, as claimed by the CPI(M), and, to the contrary, had “exacerbated the people’s sufferings” over years of recurrent LDF rule.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] State secretariat member M.V. Jayarajan took strong exception to Mr. Chennithala’s comment. He termed it “immature” for a senior politician of Mr. Chennithala’s stature. 

In a Facebook post on Saturday, Mr. Jayarajan said “nobody could erase” Ms. Rajendran’s legacy as the country’s youngest Mayor. “She won the national best Mayor award. I expected Mr. Chennithala to ask youngsters such Ms. Rajendran to intervene more strongly in public life. Instead, his words seemed to echo the sentiment of Congress workers perennially scared of Ms. Rajendran’s track record”, he stated. 

Earlier, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State president Rajeev Chandrasekhar had taken a potshot at Ms. Rajendran, stating that the LDF had removed her from the fray to “mitigate voters’ anti-incumbency anger.”

Ms. Rajendran, however, defended her term, saying that the LDF had “done more for Thiruvananthapuram than Mr. Chandrasekhar and the BJP had.”