After a fairly successful run as a career diplomat, Tharoor turned to politics during the first term of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. This was just after he lost the bid to be the UN Secretary-General in 2006.
Tharoor was first named Congress candidate from Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram in 2009. He won his first Lok Sabha election by over one lakh votes, with a whopping 44 per cent of the total votes polled.
In 2014, during the thick of the Modi wave in which PM Modi-led BJP finally replaced the Congress-led alliance from power in New Delhi, Tharoor faced the challenge of retaining Thiruvananthapuram. He finally won but the victory margin came down to just a little over 15,000 votes.
This time, Tharoor managed to come back to his 2009 winning margin. In 2019, he defeated the BJP's Kummanam Rajasekharan by over one lakh votes.
Thiruvananthapuram is now one of the most hotly contested seats in Lok Sabha Elections 2024. Tharoor is facing BJP's Rajeev Chandrasekhar whose tech-savvy initiatives in PM Modi's governance have come to define India's technology prowess.