If the Congress in Kerala is in disarray after its dismal performance in the Assembly elections, the BJP is in tatters.

The Hindutva party, or at least its state leadership, had high hopes in the southern state but ended up surrendering the lone seat it had won in 2016.

Even Ayyappa, the reigning deity at Sabarimala, did not come to the aid of the party. All its calculations went wrong. It expected the Left Front to retain power but not with such a huge majority. Nor did the party foresee such a downfall for the Congress-led United Democratic Front.

The BJP had expected at least half a dozen of its star candidates to enter the Assembly this time. It had thus hoped to make an impact within and outside the House and gain the upper hand in the state by diminishing the Congress step by step.

Instead, the party that rules the country found itself in the political gutters in Kerala. The state BJP will take a long time to recover from this terrible fiasco.

What went wrong? Some blame overconfidence, others say Kerala’s soil is not fertile for the lotus. The most popular theory is that this time the RSS decided to teach the BJP a lesson.

For quite some time, the two organisations have not been on good terms when it comes to matters Kerala. This had begun in 2018 when then BJP president Amit Shah summarily packed off the then state president, Kummanam Rajasekharan, a hardcore RSS man, to Mizoram as governor.

Even Rajasekharan, who was entrusted with retaining Nemom, the lone seat the party won in 2016, lost this time. Whatever the reasons for the setback, there is discontent brewing within the leadership.

As with the Congress, the problems within the BJP cannot be solved through cosmetic changes here and there. The current state president and firebrand leader who spearheaded the Sabarimala agitation, K. Surendran, has offered to resign after losing from both the constituencies he contested. But the central leadership, which seems to be busy analysing its defeat in Bengal, has not yet found time to sort things out in Kerala.

The southern state is anyway no longer on the radar of the BJP leadership in Delhi. Still, at some point the central leadership has to step in and put an end to the bitter rivalry among its state leaders. The sooner the better for the party.

But what had been more damaging for the BJP in Kerala were the charges of “vote trading” raised by the CPM. A day after the results, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan had accused the Congress of trading votes with the BJP to ensure more seats.

“The poll results have shown that the UDF has been dealt a massive drubbing. But what we saw even during counting day, May 2, was that they were extremely confident of winning the elections,” Vijayan said at a media briefing.

“This sort of confidence must have stemmed from the vote trading they had engaged in with the BJP.”

Vijayan attributed UDF victories in 10 seats to this “pact” with the BJP and alleged that if such a deal had not taken place the Congress-led front’s defeat would have been starker.

While the Congress has denied the charge, there has only been a muted response from the BJP accusing the CPM of “fixing” votes to defeat its candidates — an example being the defeat of Metro Man E. Sreedharan from Palakkad.

The BJP, which had earned 10.5 per cent of the votes in the 2014 parliamentary elections, had improved to 14.21 per cent in the 2015 local body elections. According to Election Commission data, the party this time polled 2,354,468 votes, which is 11.3 per cent of the total votes cast in the 115 constituencies where it fielded its own candidates.

This figure is 0.77 percentage points higher than the BJP’s vote share of 10.53 per cent in the 2016 Assembly elections. However, the NDA’s overall vote share fell by about two percentage points in the 2021 Assembly elections.

This was because of the pathetic performance of its ally BDJS, the backward Ezhava outfit floated before the 2016 Assembly polls. The BDJS could garner just over 1 per cent of the total votes polled this time, compared to 3.93 per cent in 2016.

Together, the BJP and the BDJS had 14.46 per cent of the vote share in 2016, which has fallen to 12.4 per cent this time. Clearly the Ezhavas this time went back to the CPM, which they have traditionally supported. Unbelievably, while the BDJS did not get a single vote in 319 booths, in another 493 booths it got just one vote each.

What led to such a slump for the BJP? Sreedharan had claimed the party would come to power with a minimum of 70 of the 140 seats. Surendran had claimed the party needed only 35 seats and would “acquire” the rest from other sources, meaning the buying of MLAs.

The BJP had apparently pumped more than Rs 250 crore into this election. While old and ailing leaders like Vijayan and the Congress’s Oommen Chandy trudged across the state by road, Surendran hopped from one constituency to another in a chopper.

Perhaps the biggest mistake the party made in Kerala was to bring Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath to inaugurate the NDA’s election campaign in the state. Guess what he spoke about: women’s security and “love jihad”. This was to an audience with cent per cent literacy.

Even a school-going girl in Kerala knows what sort of security her sisters get in the Hindi heartland. Did the leaders of the BJP expect their mothers to vote for the party? If so, they were totally out of tune with reality. It’s time the party wakes up and sheds its Hindutva ideology if it wants the lotus to bloom in Kerala’s fertile backwaters.