Thrissur: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will make yet another visit to Kerala Monday, his sixth trip to the state since January.
According to BJP sources, Modi will hold a roadshow in Thrissur district’s Kunnamkulam, an assembly seat that comes under the Alathur Lok Sabha constituency, before heading to Attingal and Thiruvananthapuram.
This is the prime minister’s second visit to the state since March, when the Election Commission announced the schedule for the Lok Sabha polls. He held a roadshow in Pathanamthitta and a rally in Palakkad district during that trip.
All these seats, except for Alathur, are what the BJP counts as “A-grade constituencies” and where the party expects a triangular contest with the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF).
According to one political analyst, the BJP is trying to use these visits to woo the “Modi bhakts” among the state’s non-BJP voters. This party hopes that this group, though small, could help swing an election in its favour in case of a close contest, P.J. Vincent, political analyst and head of the PG Department of History at the Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, told ThePrint.
However, another state-based commentator, C.R. Neelakandan, believes that while this strategy could help boost morale among the state’s BJP units, it won’t necessarily convert into votes.
“He doesn’t have an image of a leader who has done something good, tangible. The only thing they are saying is Ram Temple and India’s growth. That won’t have much impact among people in Kerala,” Neelakandan said.
BJP’s key constituencies
According to BJP’s ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Kerala has the highest number shakhas, or local units, in south India. According to senior RSS leaders, the state had over 4,000 shakhas in 2020.
Despite this, analysts believe that it has never translated into votes. In the 2019 general election, the UDF swept 19 of Kerala’s 20 Lok Sabha seats while the only remaining seat went to the LDF.
The BJP, meanwhile, contested 15 seats but won none. However, it secured 12.93 percent votes, up from its 2014 vote share of 10.82 percent.
The party hopes to break this losing streak with the PM’s visits. In his public speeches, Modi has focused on not only his government’s contributions to Kerala but has also taken pains to explain the dichotomy of the Congress-Left alliance.
“In Kerala, they (LDF and UDF) are each other’s rivals. But outside Kerala, they are BFFs — Best Friends Forever,” he said at a rally in Thiruvananthapuram in February.
The BJP is also focusing on five of Kerala’s 20 constituencies — Thiruvananthapuram, Attingal, Pathanamthitta, Thrissur, and Palakkad.
Though with the Congress, these are the five constituencies where the BJP secured over 20 percent of votes in 2019 and the party is pulling out all the stops to secure these seats.
The prime minister has already held rallies in Thrissur, Palakkad, and Pathanamthitta.
The party has also fielded heavyweights in all five seats. While Union Minister of State for Information Technology and Skill Development Rajeev Chandrasekhar is pitted against incumbent Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and LDF’s Pannian Raveendran at Thiruvananthapuram, the party’s former state chief and OBC leader V. Muraleedharan will fight the election from Attingal against UDF’s Adoor Prakash and the Left Front’s V. Joy.
In Pathanamthitta, Anil Antony, the BJP candidate and son of veteran Congressman A. K. Antony, hopes to dislodge sitting MP Anto Antony. In Palakkad, where the BJP won municipal elections in 2015 and 2020, the party has fielded C. Krishnakumar against sitting Congress MP V.K. Sreekandan and LDF’s A. Vijayaraghavan.
In Thrissur, the BJP has fielded actor-politician Suresh Gopi yet again. Gopi secured 28.2 percent votes in the 2019 elections but lost to Congress MP T. N. Prathapan.
Although the party fielded him from the Thrissur assembly seat in 2021, he lost that election too.
For Gopi, this election too will be challenging. The BJP leader is now facing former Congress MP K. Muraleedharan and CPI’s V.S. Sunil Kumar, a former minister and one of the most popular leaders of the Left in the district.
But the BJP leader too appears to be leaving nothing to chance. He has been camping in Thrissur since 2019 and has been taking an active interest in local affairs, even trying to woo the constituency’s Christians, who constitute a significant 24.27 percent of the district’s population.
But it’s in Pathanamthitta where the party has pinned its highest hopes. A UDF stronghold, the district was at the heart of the protests against the controversial 2018 Supreme Court order allowing women entry into the Sabarimala temple.
In 2019, the BJP hoped to use the protests in its favour by fielding K. Surendran, the party’s state chief and the man who spearheaded the Sabarimala protests. Although the gambit failed, and the party finished third behind Congress’s Anto Antony and CPI (M)’s Veena George, Surendran secured 28.97 votes — 13 percent more than the BJP had secured in 2014.
According to political analyst Vincent, quoted earlier, although the BJP hopes to use its organisational strength in Thiruvananthapuram to swing the election, this could prove difficult. This is because the upper caste Nairs will always vote for the “Tharoor effect” — the influence that MP Shashi Tharoor holds over the voters — regardless of the party the MP is in.
“And Attingal is not a constituency where the BJP could even have a close contest,” he said, adding that here, the party would be hoping to use V. Muraleedharan, a former union minister and an Ezhava-Thiyya leader, to swing the significant OBC votes.
‘Kerala’s ideological left mindset hindrance to BJP’
Despite visiting Kerala six times this year, none of Modi’s trips have been for purely official reasons. For instance, even during his official visit this January, when he launched infrastructure projects in Cochin Shipyard, the prime minister combined it with party events — including a roadshow, trips to local temples, and booth-level meetings.
According to analysts, the most significant outcome of Modi’s frequent visits is the morale boost it could give to the party’s state units.
“Even though Kerala has the highest number of RSS shakhas in south India, it never resulted in proportional votes. The party’s efforts to appease minorities are part of the work to overcome this,” Vincent said.
Neelakandan believes that the BJP’s ideology is yet to find acceptance in the state. Kerala’s social set-up of communal interdependence doesn’t allow polarisation, he said.
“The party still doesn’t have a local leadership that has attracted the public. I think the party is ideologically weak,” he said.
Vincent, however, believes that the row over the controversial movie The Kerala Story showed the extent of polarisation in the state. He was referring to the row sparked by an Idukki church’s decision to screen the movie for teenagers.
Despite this, Vincent concedes that it would be hard to determine just yet if the BJP can convert this communal polarisation into votes.
“But the main hindrance in Kerala for the BJP is its ideological left mindset,” he said. “That’s why they are not able to make inroads.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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