Thiruvananthapuram: BJP’s Kerala president Rajeev Chandrasekhar, contesting his first assembly election, won Nemom against incumbent legislator and LDF minister V. Sivankutty by a margin of 4,978 votes, data released by the Election Commission Monday showed.
Congress’s K.S. Sabarinathan was placed third in the fight.
The Nemom constituency in Thiruvananthapuram carries weight far beyond a single seat.
For Chandrasekhar, the result is a litmus test after he assumed charge of the party’s state unit in 2025. For the BJP, Nemom reclaims the only Assembly constituency the party had ever won in Kerala—last held in 2016, when O. Rajagopal won by 8,671 votes against Sivankutty.
The LDF leader won the seat back in 2021.
From capital to capital
When Chandrasekhar took charge as state president, he represented a deliberate break from the party’s earlier model of RSS-backed grassroots leaders running the Kerala unit. His appeal—built around his image as a technocrat—became the cornerstone of a recalibrated BJP strategy in a state where the party has yet to establish a significant political foothold.
One of his first moves was to launch the ‘Viksit Keralam’ convention across the party’s 30 organisational districts, training the campaign’s sights on alleged misgovernance by both the ruling LDF and the opposition UDF.
He also inducted three Christians into the party’s core committee, a signal of intent to broaden the party’s appeal among the community in Kerala.
In Nemom, the BJP counted on a combination of Chandrasekhar’s image, its strong BJP-RSS organisational base, and support from the constituency’s majority Hindu community.
For the Assembly election, Chandrasekhar chose Nemom, a constituency where he had already demonstrated individual strength. Contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Thiruvananthapuram—of which Nemom is a segment—he polled 61,227 votes in the segment against Congress’s Shashi Tharoor, who got 39,101 votes there. (Chandrasekhar lost the overall Lok Sabha seat by 16,077 votes)
On the opposing side, LDF had relied on Sivankutty’s standing as an incumbent minister and MLA.
The BJP also drew confidence from the 2025 local body elections, when it won control of the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation for the first time. Seventeen of the 23 ward councillors in Nemom are affiliated to the party.