Armed with the confidence earned from its achievement of opening account in the Assembly with the 2016 polls and the magnificent victory the party had achieved in the recent State elections in the country, the Kerala BJP is all set to unleash its biggest ever poll campaign in the State for the April 12 lok Sabha by-election in Malappuram constituency.
The battle lines have already been drawn for the by-poll, necessitated by the death of former
Union Minister E Ahamed, with the three main contending sides — the Congress-led UDF, CPI(M)-headed lDF and the BJP – announcing their candidates. E Ahamed had won the seat for his party Muslim league in the 2009 and 2014 elections by huge margins.
“The State is going to witness a different election this time. The lDF led by the CPI(M), which has become irrelevant in Kerala as well as in entire India, will be nowhere in the election picture. The fight is going to be between the UDF and the BJP. And the outcome will surprise you,” State BJP general secretary K Surendran said.
The BJP candidate is its Malappuram district vice-president N Sreeprakash, a young lawyer and a reputed name in the politics of the region. Sreeprakash himself had contested in the seat for the BJP in the 2014 election and had bagged 64,705 votes while the party’s score in the 2009 election was just 36,016 votes.
State BJP leaders may not be confident enough to predict Sreeprakash’s victory at TV talk shows but they assert that the party’s votes in Malappuram would grow six-fold compared to last polls. “It is as good as predicting victory or at least claiming the second position in a three-pronged contest in a constituency with a 12-lakh-plus electorate,” said a Kochi-based psephologist.
The by-election has no crucial significance as far as the State or national politics is concerned but it is important in some other ways for all the three sides. The UDF, currently going through perhaps the worst phase in its entire history, needs to win this by-poll to prove that it has not forgotten the art of winning elections and to keep the spirit of the workers and supporters alive.
The Muslim league, which has been contesting the seat for the UDF, has fielded one of its strongest leaders, party national general secretary and former Minister PK Kunhalikutty, as its candidate while the CPI(M) candidate is 36-year-old MB Faisal, Malappuram district president of the party’s youth wing, DYFI, and a member of the district panchayat.
Rejecting criticisms to the effect that the BJP has fielded a comparatively ‘obscure’ candidate against a political heavyweight like Kunhalikutty despite its claim that the contest is between it and the Muslim league, the BJP leadership says that it has confidence in the winning capacity of Sreeprakash, who is a respected political leader in the region.
Top State BJP leaders said the party would unleash an “unprecedented kind” of election campaign in Malappuram in the coming days. “The Marxists have fielded Faisal, a weak candidate, as part of their adjustment politics with the UDF. Such unholy, behind-the-screen alliances are not going to work. Kerala will see that in the coming days,” said a top BJP leader.
He also sought to disprove the theory that the Malappuram constituency would remain a hard nut as far as the BJP was concerned because of its Muslim concentration. “We have already seen how this theory has got shattered in Uttar Pradesh. The tactic of projecting BJP as an anti-Muslim party is not going work anymore,” he added.