It won’t be someone from the BJP but the next time Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in Kerala capital Thiruvananthapuram, he could be received by the country’s youngest mayor.
Arya Rajendran, a 21-year-old BSc student, was on Friday picked as Thiruvananthapuram mayor by the local district committee of the CPM. The decision would have to be ratified by the party’s state committee, which, according to CPM sources, would be a mere formality.
Arya defeated the Congress’s Sreekala by about 2,800 votes in the Mudavanmugal ward of the Kerala capital in the recent local body polls. The BJP, attempting to gain a toehold in Kerala, had desperately wanted to take control of the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation so that the party’s own mayor could receive Modi whenever he comes calling.
A dark horse, Arya was nowhere in the reckoning during the election campaign when the CPM projected O.G. Olena and S. Pushpalatha as the probable candidates for the mayor’s post. But both of them lost the elections.
Arya is a state committee member of the Students Federation of India (SFI), the campus wing of the CPM, and the state president of the party’s children’s organisation, Balasangham.
She belongs to a CPM family, with both parents and elder brother active members of the party. Her father Rajendran is an electrician, while mother Sreelatha is an insurance agent and elder brother Aravind works in Abu Dhabi after graduating in engineering.
The choice of Arya illustrates the importance the CPM has given to youths in
the recent polls. She is currently a second-year BSc student at All Saints College in Thiruvananthapuram and is determined to continue with her studies. Arya said her background with Balasangham and the SFI had helped her during the campaign.
“It is my experience with Balasangham and the SFI that gave me the courage and confidence to face an election,” she said, adding: “It’s the same background that will give me the strength to move forward as a councillor.”
Arya exuded confidence while saying that she would continue her studies alongside her work as a councillor. “During my campaign, people had told me to continue my studies even if I manage to win. Fulfilling that promise is one of my major goals,” she told a news channel.
The CPM-led Left Democratic Front won 51 of the 100 wards in the Thiruvananthapuram corporation, up from 43 in the 2015 civic body polls.
The Thiruvananthapuram mayor’s post has been reserved for women this term. With 50 per cent of all local body seats in the state reserved for women, mayoral positions are alternated between men and women.
V.K. Prashanth of the CPM was elected mayor after the 2015 local body polls. But he vacated the post after getting elected to the Assembly in a by-election to the Vattiyoorkavu seat in the Kerala capital in October 2019. K. Sreekumar of the CPM had replaced him.
While all political parties had fielded a lot of youngsters in the local council polls, the youngest was the CPM’s Reshma Mariam Roy, who turned 21 and thus became eligible to contest elections just a day before she filed her nomination papers.
She won from her home ward number 11 of the Aruvappulam village panchayat in Pathanamthitta district.
