The BJP opened its account in Kerala by snatching the Thrissur Lok Sabha seat from the Congress, ending decades of drought in the state that has all along ignored the saffron party in Parliament elections.
The BJP registered a thumping win with Suresh Gopi defeating much stronger rivals from the CPI and Congress. Gopi polled 4,09,302 votes to lead by a margin of 74,686 votes against V.S. Sunil Kumar of the CPI and pushed Congress heavyweight K. Muraleedharan to third place.
This is the biggest electoral achievement for the BJP, which had so far won just the Nemom Assembly constituency in 2016 before losing even that in the 2021 polls when the Left Democratic Front won a rare second consecutive term.
In the other impressive show, central minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar gave an edge- of-the-seat thriller of a performance by leading by 25,000 votes against Shashi Tharoor before the Congress candidate recovered to lead by over 15,000 votes to secure a fourth victory in a row.
Tharoor, who had declared that it would be his last Lok Sabha election and dropped hints of moving to statepolitics, made a strong pitch among his voters to bucksome amount of anti-incumbency and fatigue. The battle for Thiruvananthapuram was a near-replica of the 2014 election when Tharoor trailed veteran BJP leader O. Rajagopal until late afternoon to win by just 15,540 votes in a last-gasp surge.
Tharoor had won by 99,989 votes in 2019 against Kummanam Rajashekaran of the BJP.
Chandrasekhar accepted the “people’s verdict” and promised to work for the people. “I accept the people’s verdict. But I will continue to be here to address the problems of the people,” the visibly upset BJP candidate told reporters.
Rahul Gandhi broke no sweat to retain his Wayanad seat where he was leading by 3,64,422 votes when this report was filed. Less than his 2019 victory margin of 4,31,770, Rahul did what was expected of him although CPI’s Annie Raja gave a decent fight by polling 2,83,023 votes.
Poised to win Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh where the INDIA bloc bettered the NDA, it remains to be seen if Rahul would retain Wayanad.
The Kerala story would require plenty of explanation from the ruling LDF that merely added one to the lone seat it had won in 2019.
While it lost Alappuzha, the only seat it could win last time, to AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal, the LDF won from Attingal and Alathur from the UDF.
Adoor Prakash of the Congress retained the Attingal seat by a narrow margin of 1,708 votes after a seesaw battle with V. Joy of the CPM, thus ending the slender chance of the LDF increasing its tally to two.
Although the results, barring the lone seat for the BJP, meant good news for the INDIA bloc at the national level, back in Kerala it was immediately interpreted as a vote against chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
K.K. Rema, the lone MLA of the Revolutionary Marxist Party which is part of the UDF, told reporters that the results were a “reflection of the people’s anger against the chief minister and the LDF government”.
Rema had played a crucial role in the Vadakara constituency where celebrated former health minister K.K. Shailaja lost to Shafi Parambil of the Congress by over one lakh votes.
CPM state secretary M.V. Govindan said the party accepted the defeat and would scrutinise the performance to explore the reasons for the second successive near-wipeout in Lok Sabha polls.
“The party will closely examine what went wrong at all levels,” he told reporters.
“The result in the 2019 elections was almost the same. Yet the LDF retained power in the state in the following (2021) state elections. So let’s not go there,” he said when asked if the LDF was losing grip on the state.
