The BJP's lotus failed to bloom in God's Own Country in the 16th lok Sabha election too, but the increase in the vote-share of its candidates in all the 20 seats in the State shows that it is indeed in the budding stage and that the day the party opens account in Kerala may not be very far.
That the people of Kerala have started to think differently and that they may not put their entire trust in the two main political coalitions — Congress-led UDF and CPI(M)-headed lDF — have been obvious from the phenomenal surge seen in the vote-share of the BJP candidates in at least two seats - Thiruvananthapuram and Kasaragod.
BJP leaders are of the opinion that party's performance could have been far better in Kerala if the two main fronts had fought the polls on issues and merits instead of adopting the usual strategy of appealing to community vote-banks. Even the CPI(M), which claims to be secular and materialistic in its outlook, had adopted this strategy, they say.
The increase in the BJP's vote-share in the State to 10.82 per cent in this election from the 6.31 per cent it had got in 2009 is attributed to the systematic work the party had done in the election, the spread of the nationwide Narendra Modi wave into Kerala and the general loathing of the people for the alleged politics of understanding of the two fronts, BJP leaders say.
According to senior BJP leaders like MT Ramesh, many sympathisers of both the UDF and the lDF had voted for the BJP candidates in this election. “Many people, who wanted to register their protests against the corrupt UPA regime but who thought that the left did not deserve to be supported, could have voted for our candidates,” says Ramesh.
“Generally speaking, the Kerala voters are disillusioned. They know that both the main fronts are not dependable. Still, whenever there is the possibility of a third force gathering strength, these fronts take up the card of community politics. That is what had happened in this election also,” said another BJP leader.
In Thiruvananthapuram, where Congress's Shashi Tharoor emerged as the winner, BJP's O Rajagopal claimed a strong second place pushing lDF's Bennet Abraham, who relied on the strength of the huge Nadar vote-bank, to a pathetic third place. Almost throughout the vote-counting process, Rajagopal had generated a feeling that he was set to win.
In Kasaragod, BJP's young State general secretary K Surendran got nearly 50,000 more votes than what he himself had got in the 2009 election, indicating that the pattern of voting in that constituency with sharp community divisions need not be the same always. Apart from this, BJP candidates in four other constituencies polled more than 1,00,000 votes each.