BJP is devoting on Kerala too,Kerala assembly election, UDF, CPM-led LDF, Shashi Tharoor, Thiruvananthapuram, third front, Kerala polls, BJP kerala candidate list
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- Last Updated: Friday, 18 March 2016 15:24
BJP is devoting on Kerala too,Kerala assembly election, UDF, CPM-led LDF, Shashi Tharoor, Thiruvananthapuram, third front, Kerala polls, BJP kerala candidate list
The buzz ahead of the upcoming round of assembly elections may be about Assam, but the BJP seems to be investing a lot in Kerala — the party’s candidate list for the Kerala polls, released earlier this week, includes the party’s heavyweights in the state unit.
In the past, the senior leadership would stay away from the contest.Clearly, the party sees itself as a challenger to the two coalitions, the Congress-led UDF and the CPM-led LDF, which have dominated state politics for over half a century.
Interestingly, few candidates independent of the UDF and the LDF have won an assembly election in Kerala since 1980. New political formations that emerge from splits in existing outfits are co-opted by one of the two fronts. The BJP has never won an assembly or Lok Sabha seat in Kerala.
The BJP’s resolve to do well this time is arguably strengthened by its performance in the state in the 2014 general election.
Riding the Modi wave, the party scooped up nearly 11 per cent of the votes polled in Kerala, leading in four of the seven assembly segments that constitute the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency, where the party candidate, O. Rajagopal, finished second. He also pushed the Left nominee to third place, although he lost out to the Congress’s Shashi Tharoor.
The party has also sought to build a third front by roping in the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), a political outfit formed by the leader of the SNDP, a platform of the Ezhava community.
The BDJS, itself a coalition of various caste bodies disgruntled with the UDF and the LDF, is an untested entity. The BJP-BDJS front claims to represent “Hindu interests” and accuses the UDF and the LDF of pandering to the interests of religious minorities.