The party ended up surrendering the lone seat it had won in 2016.
New Delhi: If the Congress in Kerala is in disarray after its dismal performance in the state Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party is in tatters. The Hindutva party, or at least its state leadership, had high hopes in the southern states, but ended up surrendering the lone seat it had won in 2016. Even Ayyappa, the reigning deity at Sabarimala, could 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 the party foresee such a downfall of the Congress-led United Democratic Front. The party expected at least half a dozen of its star candidates to enter the Assembly this time. Thus it hoped to make an impact within and outside the Assembly and gain upper hand in the state by diminishing Congress step by step. Instead, the party that rules the country, found itself in the political gutters of Kerala. The state BJP will take a long time to recover from this terrible fiasco.
What went wrong? Some say over confidence, others say the soil in Kerala is not fertile for the lotus to bloom. The most popular theory doing the rounds is that this time, some in the RSS decided to teach the BJP a lesson. For quite some time, the two organisations were reportedly not on good terms when it comes to matters relating to Kerala. This had started back in 2018, when the then BJP president Amit Shah summarily packed off the then state president Kumanam Rajasekharan, a hardcore RSS man, to Mizoram as Governor. Even Rajasekharan, who was entrusted to retain Nemom, the lone seat that the party won last time, lost. Whatever be the reasons for the setback, there is discontent brewing within the state leadership. As is the case with the Congress, the problems within the BJP cannot be solved by cosmetic changes here and there. The current state president firebrand leader who spearheaded the Sabarimala agitation, K. Surendran, who had contested from two constituencies and lost both, has offered to resign. But the central leadership which seems to be busy analysing its defeat in Bengal has not yet found time to sort out things in Kerala. In any way the southern state is no more on the radar of its 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 BJP in the state were charges of “vote trading” raised by the CPM. A day after the results, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan accused the Congress alleging it had engaged in vote trading to ensure more seats. “The poll results have shown that the UDF has been dealt a massive drubbing. But what we saw even during the counting day on May 2 was that they were extremely confident of winning the elections. This sort of confidence must have been due to the vote trading they had engaged in with the BJP,” Vijayan said at a press briefing. He attributed the UDF victory in ten seats to this “pact” with the BJP and alleged that if such a deal had not taken place the Congress-led front’s debacle would have been more severe. While the Congress vehemently denied these charges, there was hardly any convincing retort from the BJP leadership. There was only a muted response from the party counter alleging CPM of “fixing” votes to defeat BJP candidates, a glaring example is the defeat of “Metro Man” E. Sreedharan from Palakkad. Perhaps this was because there was evidently a dip in the vote share of the BJP compared to previous occasions.
The party which earned 10.5 per cent vote share in the 2014 parliamentary elections had improved it to 14.21 per cent in the 2015 local body elections. According to the Election Commission data, BJP got 2354,468 votes which is 11.3 per cent of the total votes of 115 constituencies where the party fielded its own candidates. This figure is 0.77 per cent higher than BJP’s vote share of 10.53 per cent in the 2016 Assembly elections. However, the overall vote share of the NDA has come down by 1.95 per cent in the 2021 Assembly elections. This was solely due to the pathetic performance of its ally BDJS, the backward Ezhava outfit floated at the time of 2016 Assembly polls. BDJS could garner only 1 per cent of the total votes polled this time compared to 3.93 per cent in 2016. Together BJP and BDJS had 14.46 per cent vote share during 2016 elections, but this has come down to 12.4 per cent this time. Clearly Ezhavas, traditionally CPM supporters, have gone back this time around. Unbelievably, while the party did not get a single vote in 319 booths, in another 493 booths it got one vote each!
So what led to such a level? Sreedharan had claimed that the party would come to power with a minimum of 70 of the 140 seats. Surendran claimed that the party needed only 35 seats, the rest it would “acquire” from other sources. BJP had apparently pumped in a lot of campaign money this election. While old and ailing leaders like Pinarayi Vijayan and Oommen Chandy wearily trudged kilometres across the state by road, Surendran was hopping from one constituency to another in a chopper!
Perhaps the biggest mistake the party made in Kerala was to bring UP Chief Minister Adityanath to inaugurate NDA’s election campaign in the state. He talked about: women’s security and love jihad. This was to an audience of cent percent literacy in the country.
Even a school going girl in Kerala knows what sort of security her sisters get in some other heartland! It is time for the party to wake up if it wants the lotus to bloom in Kerala’s fertile backwaters.