lDF, UDF poised evenly
Over 2.42 crore voters of Kerala will march to the polling booths on Thursday to elect their 20 lok Sabha members even as the Congress-led UDF and the CPI(M)-headed lDF are in a neck-and-neck race in the State which the Congress expects to give it the highest number of MPs from one State after Karnataka.
As open campaigning for the 16th lok Sabha elections in Kerala had come to a close on Tuesday evening, candidates were engaged in “silent campaign” meeting friends and relatives and visiting places of worship on Wednesday in a last-minute bid to ensure votes. In the 2009 election in the State, the UDF had bagged 16 seats while the remaining four seats were won by the lDF.
National leaders had enlivened the campaign scene in the State in the past two weeks. They included Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, NDA’s PM candidate Narendra Modi, BJP leader lK Advani, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat and its Politbureau members Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechuri.
Chief electoral Officer Nalini Netto said that 2,126 of the total 21,424 polling booths in the State had been identified as sensitive and over 51,000 security personnel including those from the Kerala Police and 55 companies of forces from outside were deployed on election duty. Most of the sensitive booths were in Kannur, Kozhikode and Kasaragod districts, she said.
A total of 269 candidates are in the fray in the State, including five Union Ministers of the Congress and one of its allies, the Muslim league. A total of seven former State Ministers — four of them from the Congress and three from the left — are trying their luck in this election in which a total of 27 woman candidates are in the fray.
The UDF has fielded its sitting MPs in 14 constituencies while all the four sitting MPs of the left are in the fray. From the UDF side, the Congress is contesting 15 seats, the Muslim league two and the KC(M), the RSP, which till a month ago was an lDF partner, and the Socialist Janata (Democratic) are contesting in one seat each.
From the part of the lDF, front leader CPI(M) has fielded candidates in 15 seats while the CPI is contesting in four and one seat is being contested by the Janata Dal (S). Five of the fifteen candidates the CPI(M) has fielded are Independents while the CPI also has fielded one Independent candidate.
The Aam Aadmi Party has fielded candidates — including noted journalist Anita Pratap and writer Sara Joseph — in 15 constituencies. Besides, candidates of the SDPI, the political wing of Islamist outfit Popular Front of India, and the Welfare Party of the Jama’at-e-Islami are also contesting the polls.
Two constituencies are witnessing tough triangular contests due to the presence of strong BJP candidates. Former Union minister O Rajagopal, the BJP candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, is giving nightmares to Congress’s Shashi Tharoor while State BJP general secretary K Surendran is giving a tough time to candidates of both the UDF and the lDF in Kasaragod. Pundits had been speaking of a big tilt in UDF’s favour in the beginning of electioneering with opinion polls even predicting it to win up to 18 of the 20 seats. However, towards the close of campaigning, almost all of them had reversed their observations and they now say that the UDF-lDF tallies could be anything between 12-8 and 10-10.
The main issues the left had been focusing on in this election are price rise, corruption of the UPA and the UDF Governments, the infamous solar scam, the controversial K Kasturirangan committee report on protection of the Western Ghats and the Judiciary’s scathing observations against Oommen Chandy and his office in various graft and fraud cases.
The Congress and its allies have been attacking the left over the CPI(M)’s politics of violence as manifested in the murder of rebel Marxist leader TP Chandrasekharan of Onchiyam, Kozhikode and the big-brotherly attitude the Marxists have been showing to their allies in the lDF which is said to have forced the RSP to quit the front and join the Congress-led front.