Two World Cup winners are current members of the Lok Sabha -- Kirti Azad and Yusuf Pathan, both from West Bengal.
Another made a bid to join a state assembly back in 2016 -- like Yusuf Pathan, he is a double World Cup winner, having won both the T20 World Cup in 2007 and the ODI World Cup four years later.
Yes, we're referring to the mercurial Sreesanth who took the vital catch to dismiss Misbah-ul-Haq that led to India clinching the inaugural T20 World Cup.
Sreesanth came on the BJP's radar after his father-in-law Hirendra Singh Shekhawat had introduced him to the party's Kerala president V Muraleedharan.
Shekhawat's family was well-connected to the Sangh Parivar but Sreesanth's own family had a different political orientation, with his father having been a staunch communist.
However, Sreesanth said on the campaign trail that his father had been leaning towards the BJP after PM Narendra Modi came to power.
Sreesanth was thrust into a stiff fight in the Thiruvananthapuram constituency where he was pitted against the sitting MP and then Health Minister VS Sivakumar of the Congress. Moreover, Thiruvananthapuram was not his home turf as he hails from Ernakulam district.
For a debutant in a state where the BJP had never won an assembly seat before, Sreesanth's performance was respectable -- 34,764 people cast their ballots in favour of him, which amounted to 27.9 per cent of the votes.
But it wasn't enough to win or even come second -- he finished behind Sivakumar and LDF candidate Antony Raju of the Janathipathya Kerala Congress. The difference between him and Raju was just over 800 votes, while the difference between him and Sivakumar was over 11,000.
The BJP did, however, open its account in that assembly election from another seat in the state capital -- Nemom -- where party veteran O Rajagopal won at the age of 86.
It was a case of being twelfth time lucky for Rajagopal who had lost six Lok Sabha elections and five assembly elections before finally tasting sweet victory.
