NDA fails to open LS account in Kerala again

Thiruvananthapuram: The hopes of state BJP and the RSS leaders to bag a few Lok Sabha seats were dashed when the results were announced on Thursday.

They were anticipating to win Thiruvananthapuram, Pathanamthitta and Thrissur constituencies. While they emerged second in the capital, they were relegated to the third position in the last two seats. Now, all eyes are going to be on the BJP’s national president Amit Shah’s next move on the State leadership which failed miserably to cash in on the Sabarimala issue. If the BJP had managed to get 10.3 per cent vote share during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, now their vote share has increased slightly, to 12.93 per cent.

The State RSS leadership was keen to bring in Mizoram Governor Kummanam Rajasekhar to contest from Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat. There was a triangular contest between the UDF’s Shashi Tharoor and LDF’s C. Divakaran. There was a minority consolidation in favour of Tharoor much to the disappointment of the BJP and RSS camps. Their only solace was they managed to push Divakaran to the third position.

At the same time, hopes were high on BJP state general secretary K. Surendran, who emerged third in Pathanamthitta, the epicentre of the Sabarimala politics.

It may be recalled that it was the RSS state leadership who ensured that Kummanam and Surendran should contest from Thiruvananthapuram and Pathanamthitta seats.

“This is not only the defeat of the State BJP leadership, the RSS leadership also share equal responsibility for its poor performance.

Probably, BJP state president P.S. Sreedharan Pillai will claim that if he had contested from Pathanamthitta, he would have won with the help of the NSS votes there,” a senior BJP leader told this newspaper.

It may be recalled that the candidature in Pathanamthitta was delayed with Sreedharan Pillai and Surendran eyeing the seat. The RSS State leadership which took a call had favoured Mr Surendran.

In Thrissur, the RSS leadership had expected actor turned politician Suresh Gopi to get more than 3.5 lakh votes but he had to be satisfied with 2,93,822 votes. However, interestingly, K.S. Radhakrishnan had  polled over 1.86 lakh votes in Alappuzha which was rather unexpected. Until a few months ago, he was in the Congress camp and the BJP had not expected him to garner so many votes from Alappuzha.

But now the BJP and RSS leaderships have to concentrate on the next battle in front of them — the Assembly byelection in Vattiyoorkavu, Konni, Aroor and Ernakulam and also in Pala and Manjeshwaram.

When it comes to allies, BDJS state president Tushar Vellapally came third by polling 78,816 votes against Congress’ Rahul Gandhi and CPI’s P.P. Suneer.