The two main political fronts of Kerala, the UDF and the lDF, have so far not felt the need of worrying about possibility of the BJP bagging a seat in any Assembly or lok Sabha election in the State but the projections of a recent pre-poll survey has baffled both the fronts as it has forecast that the BJP may win one seat out of the total 20 in the State.
The Times Now-C Voter pre-poll survey, whose results came out last week, has predicted that the BJP in Kerala was poised to win one seat, ending the electoral drought that party has been experiencing so far. As per the survey results, the Congress-led ruling UDF may win ten seats and the CPI(M)-led lDF may get nine seats while the BJP may emerge victorious in one.
Responses from leaders in both the UDF and lDF show that the two fronts are more worried about the BJP’s possibility of winning a seat in Kerala where the lotus has not bloomed yet more than the question of losing a seat from their own kitty. “The simple fact is that they still refuse to consider BJP as a force to be worried about,” said a BJP leader.
As per the Times Now-C-voter survey, the ruling UDF may get a total of ten seats with the Congress winning seven seats and its allies Kerala Congress (M) and Muslim league bagging one and two seats respectively. The survey predicts the CPI(M)-led left front to get a total of nine seats.
“The survey has already confused the two fronts and both of them have started efforts to find out whether there could be any truth in the projection with respect to the BJP. Sources in the CPI(M) claimed that their analysis so far had not shown any possibility of any of the 20 seats in the State falling into the kitty of the BJP.
Parties in both the fronts agree that if BJP has any chance of winning in the lok Sabha election in Kerala, it will be Thiruvananthapuram, which is presently being represented in Parliament by Union Minister Shashi Tharoor. Kasaragod is seen as the other lok Sabha constituency in Kerala where the BJP is strong, according to observers.
“I still don’t want to trust this survey for various reasons, not just for the mention of the BJP’s chance,” said a top leader of the Congress who was one of the campaign managers for Tharoor in the 2009 polls. “I am ready to agree that the BJP is strong in Thiruvananthapuram but it is not strong enough to win that seat,” he said.
But observers tend to find some credibility in the survey especially in the context of the general increase in popularity of the party after the advent of Narendra Modi as the NDA’s prime ministerial candidate. They say that pro-BJP sentiment is visible among a good section of the electorate in Thiruvananthapuram, especially after the February 9 rally in which Modi took part.
In the 2004 polls, senior BJP leader O Rajagopal had lost the second place in Thiruvananthapuram to Congress’s VS Sivakumar by just 3,402 votes. While winner PK Vasudevan Nair of the CPI had bagged 2,86,057 votes, Rajagopal had got 2,28,058 votes. Most probably, Rajagopal will be the BJP candidate in Thiruvananthapuram in this election as well.
“What is certain about the election in Thiruvananthapuram is that it will be seeing a tough triangular contest. In such a fight, it need not be impossible for the BJP to increase its vote-share decisively with the help of the Modi wave especially when one considers the general characteristic of the Thiruvananthapuram electorate,” said a senior journalist.
What the BJP is afraid of is the possibility of the UDF and lDF entering into an informal agreement to transfer votes between themselves to avoid a BJP win, a practice the two fronts allegedly used to adopt in Assembly elections in certain north Kerala constituencies whenever the BJP seemed to be offering tough fight.