Bharatiya Janata Party candidate “Metro Man” Elattuvalapil Sreedharan on Sunday lost to Congress leader Shafi Parambil in Palakkad constituency of Kerala by a margin of 3,859 votes, data from the Election Commission showed.

Counting of votes in Kerala, Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry began at 8 am and is still underway. The majority mark in the 140-seat Kerala Assembly is 71.

The Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front swept the elections, breaking the jinx of rotating power between the LDF and the Congress-led United Democratic Front in the state for the last 44 years. This will be the first time since 1983 the incumbent government will come come back to power in Kerala.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, on the other hand, was yet to open its account in the state. The party, which won a seat in the state for the first time in the previous Assembly elections in 2016, had banked on the popularity of Sreedharan. The 88-year old engineer is credited with setting up metro rail infrastructure in several Indian cities, earning him the moniker “metro man”.

He joined the party months ahead of the elections and was dubbed to be the chief ministerial candidate. However, it was not to be.

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