Chengannur in southern Kerala has been the scene of a fierce electoral battle for weeks now and even the deadly Nipah outbreak, which has already claimed 12 lives and disrupted daily life, especially in the north, has failed to diminish its intensity. The Assembly constituency in Alapuzha votes on May 28 in a bye-election that has become a matter for prestige for all three of the state’s dominant political forces. While the ruling Left Democratic Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), is hoping to retain the seat it wrested from the United Democratic Front, led by the Congress, in 2016, the opposition grouping is seeking to retake what used to be its citadel. The Bharatiya Janata Party, meanwhile, is out to prove that the surge in its vote share in the last election was no fluke.
The ruling coalition has fielded Saji Cherian, the CPI(M) district secretary in Alappuzha, while the Congress is banking on D Vijayakumar. The BJP has repeated its candidate from the last election, PS Sreedharan Pillai.
The election was necessitated by the death of KK Ramanchandran Nair, who defeated the Congress’s PC Vishnunath by 7,983 votes in 2016. Nair polled 52,880 votes to Vishnunath’s 44,897. Pillai tallied 42,682 votes, a giant leap from the 6,062 votes that the BJP had secured in the 2011 Assembly election.
Chengannur has always voted for the Congress except on four occasions when it went with the communists. The upper caste Hindu Nairs are estimated to constitute 28% of the electorate in Chengannur while the Ezhavas, listed among the Hindu Other Backward Classes, account for about 18%. The constituency has a sizable Christain population as well.
The bye-election is a referendum on the Left Democratic Front government, declared Thomas Isaac, the finance minister. He also said it was a straight fight between his CPI(M) and the Congress. “There is no triangular fight,” he told an election rally on Saturday. “The BJP is lagging far behind the two parties.”
The Congress’ Ramesh Chennithala agreed. “It is a fight between the Congress and the CPI(M),” the leader of opposition said. “BJP is not a force to reckon with this time.”
Yet, he seemed to put the BJP at the heart of the contest by saying the “people of Chengannur will vote against the anti-people policies of both state and central governments”. The central government, of course, is led by the BJP.
The BJP alleged that its rivals were ganging up on the saffron party. “They want to ensure BJP’s defeat,” Kummanam Rajashekharan, the party’s state chief said in Chengannur on Thursday, a day before he was appointed the governor of Mizoram.
Test for BJP
The bye-election is a big test for the BJP, which has been working hard to find a foothold in Kerala but without much success. The party has a single representative in the 140-member Assembly.
The party’s leadership is hoping that Pillai’s rapport with the voters would translate into votes once again. It launched a door-to-door campaign well before the election was announced, and brought in high-profile campaigners such as Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and central ministers Prakash Javadekar and Alphons Kannanthanam.
However, cracks in the National Democratic Alliance, led by the BJP, have weakened the party’s chances. Its major ally, the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena, which claims to represent the Ezhavas, has not participated in Pillai’s campaign in protest against the delay in giving the community positions on various boards and corporations, as promised by the central government. “Our cadres are disillusioned,” the party’s president Thushar Vellappally said. “Hence we abstained from the campaign.”
Vellappally claimed his party has 41,000 votes in the constituency. “Our votes helped BJP put up a strong showing in 2016,” he added.
The Bharat Dharma Jana Sena is, in fact, a creation of the BJP, launched just a few months before the 2016 election with the help of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, an Ezhava community organisation. This time, however, the organisation has gone against the BJP, with its leader Vellappally Natesan asking the community to vote for a candidate who supports the Yogam. In 2016, he had explicitly sought votes for the saffron party.
Still, BJP leaders insisted all was well within the National Democratic Alliance. “BDJS is still an NDA ally,” said Rajashekharan. “They will cast votes for BJP.”
Rajashekharan’s appointment as governor on Friday night caught the party’s rank and file by surprise, not least because he was coordinating the campaign. It also gave the party’s rivals a stick to beat the BJP with. Kodiyeri Balakrishnan described it as a “punishment transfer”. “He was moved out of the state to solve BJP’s internal issues,” the CPI(M) state chief claimed. “BJP is fighting the election without a head now.”
Advantage Congress
The BJP’s troubles could work to the Congress’s advantage. By fielding Vijayakumar, known to be close to the Nair Service Society, an influential Nair organisation, the party expects to bring back the votes it lost in 2016. As former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy pointed out recently, the BJP’s stellar performance in the last election had come largely at the Congress’s expense.
Vijayakumar is Kerala vice president of the Akhila Bharatha Ayyappa Seva Sangham, which provides services to pilgrims to the hill shrine of Sabarimala, and enjoys a good rapport with the people.
The game changer, however, could be the decision of the Kerala Congress (Mani) to campaign for Vijayakumar. The party, which is backed by the Church, wields considerable support among Chengannur’s Christians. Mani left the Congress-led alliance in 2016 and the CPI(M) had been trying to bring him to their side ever since, obviously to tap into his party’s Christian support base. He appears to have buried his differences with his old allies, though.
On the other hand, the CPI(M) is determined to keep the seat, banking on the Pinarayi Vijayan government’s governance record. The ruling party also hopes Natesan’s directive to members of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam will work in its favour.
Cherian, who managed Ramachandran Nair’s campaign in 2016, sounded confident of victory. “Nair initiated plenty of development activities in the constituency,” he said on Saturday. “My victory will ensure that they are continued. I am sure that people will vote for development.”