Kerala withstands Modi wave

Withstanding the Modi wave, the two dominant fronts led by the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have shared the 20 Lok Sabha seats (12-8) in Kerala.

The Bharatiya Janata Party that swept the country once again failed to open its account in the state. O. Rajagopal kept the party hopes alive at Trivandrum till the final round but at the end gave in to Sashi Tharoor of the Congress, who retained the seat by a reduced margin of 15,470 votes. The BJP has pushed the Communist Party of India (CPI) to the third position in the state capital.

The BJP, on the other hand, ended third in Kasargod, another constituency on which the party pinned its hopes. Despite Modi’s campaign, party candidate K. Surendran could secure only 47,344 votes more than the total votes he himself polled there in 2009. The seat was retained by P. Karunakaran by 6,921 votes. He had won the seat in 2009 by 64,427 votes.

The BJP crossed 100,000 votes in Trivandrum, Kasargod, Palghat, Calicut, Trichur and Pathanamthitta. This is for the first time the party is crossing this figure in these many seats.

The party also came close to 100,000 votes in Ernakulam. This has helped the party to nearly double its last election vote share of 6.31 per cent. The ruling United Democratic Front led by the Congress has gained an upper hand in the current election by winning 12 seats.

The Congress alone won eight seats. The remaining four were won by the Indian Union Muslim League (two), Kerala Congress (one) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (one).

The UDF winners include six federal ministers — Shashi Tharoor, Kodikkunnil Suresh, K.C. Venugopal, K.V. Thomas, Mullappally Ramachandran and E. Ahmed — and five sitting MPs — Anto Antony, Jose K. Mani, M.K. Raghavan, E.T. Mohammed Basheer and M.I. Shanavaz. Among them, Mullappally (3,306) had a narrow victory. The Congress lost three sitting MPs — P.C. Chacko (Chalakkudy), K. Dhanapalan (Trichur) and K. Sudhakaran (Kannur). Kerala is perhaps the only state in the country to return all the UPA ministers and majority of the sitting MPs.

The opposition Left Democratic Front headed by the CPM has retained all the sitting seats — Attingal, Alathur, Palghat and Kasargod — and captured another four from the Congress. The swapping of seats by Chacko and Dhanaplan seemed to have helped the LDF to win the Trichur and Chalakkudy seats easily.

Malayalam comedian Innocent, who was fielded by the CPM as independent, humbled Chacko, national spokesman of the Congress party, by 13,884 votes at Chalakkudy. Joyce George, another independent the CPM fielded at Idukki, had an easy going against Youth Congress president Dean Kuriakose. The strong resentment of the farmers against the Kasthurirangan panel recommendations for the conservation of Western Ghats helped him win the seat by a margin of 50,542 votes.

Three other independents fielded by the CPM could not make any major impact.

The defeat of Politburo member M.A. Baby at Quilon is considered as a big setback for CPM since it had driven N.K. Premachandran, who won the seat by a margin of 37,649 votes, to the UDF by denying the seat to the RSP.

The victory of P.K. Sreemathy at Kannur and the narrow loss of A.N. Shamseer at Vatakara are comforting for the party since the party was in the dock there over the murder of party rebel T.P. Chandrashekharan. Curiously, the Revolutionary Marxist Party floated by Chandrashekharan, could poll only 17,229 votes in Vatakara.

The additional seats, the CPM has won in Kerala are not of much help to the party, which requires 11 seats to save its national status. As per the present trends, the CPM is not likely to win more than nine seats throughout the country.

The upper hand the UDF got in Kerala, on the other hand, may strengthen the position of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who had declared the election as a referendum for his three-year-old government. With eight seats that his party has won in the state, he has become one of the most powerful among the chief ministers in the Congress-ruled states.

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