The BJP had all the reasons to dream of the lotus blooming in God’s Own Country for the first time in the 16th lok Sabha election, but it lost that chance on Friday as the State’s electorate — after generating some hopes — refused to deviate from its habit of not walking with the national sentiment at crucial junctures as it had done in 1977.
The BJP lost the chance to open account in Kerala this time also when its candidate O Rajagopal, former Union Minister, came within arm’s length of making that achievement in Thiruvananthapuram constituency but lost the race to Congress’s Shashi Tharoor in a photo-finish contest.
From the stage of the counting of the postal votes at the very beginning of the process at 8.00 am Friday, Rajagopal had maintained a steady lead over Tharoor, pushing lDF’s Independent candidate Bennet J Abraham into third place. When 57 per cent of the polled votes were counted, Rajagopal was leading over Tharoor by nearly 13,000 votes.
Those were moments of excitement, tension and joy at Mararji Bhavan, the State BJP headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, where Rajagopal sat with his eyes glued on to the TV screen along with party chief V Muraleedharan and others as journalists were jostling outside to congratulate the candidate and seek his responses.
Then the lead began to slide but the impression still was that Rajagopal, who had claimed a strong third place in the 2004 election bagging over 2,28,000 votes, would win the seat. Sitting MP Tharoor, who had already said that he might not win this time, confined himself to his house and refused to appear before journalists.
As counting of 75 per cent votes was completed, the scene began to change. When 76 per cent of the votes were counted, Tharoor got in the front, leading by a range of 230 to 390 votes but there was no big surge in his lead as the counting progressed. In fact, when the counting had entered into the last 10 per cent, Rajagopal was in the front once again.
After that, the excitement in the BJP office began to wane as Tharoor maintained a steady lead but Muraleedharan was not yet ready to give up hope, "The votes remaining to be counted are from panchayats where the UDF and the BJP are equally strong. I don't think we should come to a conclusion before the entire votes are counted."
However, as the counting concluded, Tharoor won the seat by a margin of 15,470 votes. He polled 2,97,806 votes, while Rajagopal's share was 2,82,336 votes. An analysis of the performance of the candidates in Assembly segments proved that four of the seven Assembly constituencies in Thiruvananthapuram had stood by the BJP.
Muraleedharan, visibly disappointed by the turn of events, blamed Kerala's habit of never sharing the national sentiment. However, the general pro-BJP sentiment seen all over the country and the obvious Narendra Modi wave had indeed created ripples in Kerala also as the BJP improved its vote-share in almost all the constituencies.
State BJP general secretary K Surendran improved his own 2009 vote-share of 1,25,482 votes in Kasaragod to 1,72,826 while former State party chief CK Padmanabhan polled 1,15,760 votes in Kozhikode, where the party candidate in 2009 had got 89,118 votes. In Pathanamthitta, where the party had polled only 56,294 in 2009, senior leader MT Ramesh bagged 1,38,954 votes this time.