Despite talks about a strong anti-incumbency wave, Kerala’s Congress-led ruling UDF won the Assembly by-election held in Aruvikkara constituency convincingly. The bypoll result generated a feeling that the BJP was in the process of emerging as a credible alternative in the politics of the State where the UDF and CPI(M)-led the lDF ruled alternately. It also suggested that the Marxists could be losing their ability to win elections in Kerala after West Bengal.
As the counting of votes polled on June 27 concluded late Tuesday morning, Congress’s KS Sabarinathan emerged as the victor by beating his nearest rival, M Vijayakumar of the Opposition lDF’s CPI(M), by a margin of 10,128 votes. BJP’s O Rajagopal, former Union Minister, bagged 34,145 votes. The BJP had got only 7,694 votes in the 2011 Assembly poll in Aruvikkara constituency.
Sabarinathan’s victory is certain to strengthen the position of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy in the groupism-ridden State Congress. Chandy had from the very beginning of the campaigning been boldly saying that the bypoll would be a referendum on the performance of his four-year-old Government, which had been beleaguered by various scams.
Vijayakumar’s defeat has put the entire CPI(M) leadership in the dock, especially former State secretary and Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan, under whose leadership the left has lost all the bypolls it has fought and who was the supreme poll manager in Aruvikkara though he had not addressed the voters even once.
About 26,000 more votes had been cast in the bypoll than in the 2011 election, but there was no corresponding growth in the votes polled by the Congress or the leftist candidate, suggesting that the growth in the electorate and the rise in voter turnout had helped only BJP’s Rajagopal, a former Union Minister. The bypoll, for which 16 candidates were in the fray, had witnessed 76.31 per cent voter turnout.
Sabarinathan, son of senior Congress leader and Speaker G Karthikeyan whose death in March had necessitated the bypoll, polled 56,448 votes while CPI(M)’s Vijayakumar, former Minister and former Speaker, got 46,320 votes. Karthikeyan, who had been representing Aruvikkara since 1991, had got 56,797 votes while his lDF rival of the RSP had polled 46,123 votes.
NOTA came fourth with 1,430 votes and the fifth position (1197 votes) went to K Das, candidate of the Anti-Corruption Democratic Front backed by Chandy’s former troubleshooter PC George, who was removed as the UDF Government’s chief whip in April. Poonthura Siraj, candidate of the PDP of Islamist leader Abdul Nasser Madani, polled only 703 votes.
Sabarinathan had managed to maintain clear lead over his lDF rival in seven of the eight panchayats that constituted the Aruvikkara constituency, showing how badly the Marxists had fared in the bypoll. The left could not make any impact even in the areas with concentration of working class population.
According to observers, the bypoll result proves that the left has become weaker when its performance in the bypoll is compared with that in the 2014 lok Sabha election in Aruvikkara. CPI(M)’s A Sampath, MP from Attingal, had got a lead of over 4,000 votes in the Assembly segment in that election but that performance failed to reflect on the by-election.
Notably, the BJP raised its vote share and strength in all the eight panchayats including those with considerable presence of minorities, emboldening State party president V Muraleedharan to claim, “With this by-election, the BJP has emerged as the single largest party in Kerala and the people of the State have accepted us as the main Opposition party.”