Why is the Bjp unable to win Elections in Kerala?

By: M.R. Lalu
The Modi Juggernaut is the electoral victories of the BJP since 2014 are ornamentally described as. Winning the Hindi heartlands of India, the BJP has always been making consistent progress in electoral politics. But towards the south, its influence was exiguous except in Karnataka which the BJP managed to make it a party stronghold. The party enjoyed meagre support or no support in the remaining south Indian states. But it never hesitated to painstakingly toil to make its presence felt. Among those, Kerala was the only state that rigorously kept the BJP at a distance from winning elections, except once in 2016 the saffron party managed to win one seat in its history, sending the party veteran O. Rajagopal to the state assembly from Thiruvananthapuram. When it comes to the parliament, the party had multiple arduous experiments during elections but it was never successful. Kerala’s political intransigence remained unblemished all through the Modi wave, as a large area of the country conceded to the saffron dominance. Interestingly, the BJP has been actively present in the state ever since its first incarnation, the Jan Sangh. The Jan Sangh had its 14th National Plenary session conducted in Kerala in 1967 in which Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay was crowned as its National President.  There has always been an inflow of congruent Sangh ideologies into the social life of Kerala. Contribution of intellectuals like P. Parameswaran a senior RSS pracharak and ideologue, who rose to become the National Vice-President of the Jan Sangh, brought great fertility to the saffron thoughts in Kerala. He later chose to leave electoral politics completely and pursued and propagated cultural nationalism.
Year 1967 was again crucial for the Jan Sangh as the party was catapulted to the level of a political pressure force against the E.M.S. Namboodiripad led Communist government. Kowtowed to the demand of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), the state government decided to trim-size a new district chiseled out of Palakkad, Kozhikode and Kannur districts. This was purely on religious lines as the Malappuram District as it is today, was then a Muslim dominated area. In line with the creation of Pakistan, the IUML wanted a ‘Mappilasthan’ carved out of the three districts in the Malabar region. The Jan Sangh had fought against this move with great vigor, sending almost all its veteran leaders to jail. Again in 1975 during the emergency, many of its senior leaders were arrested under Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). So, the presence of RSS, Jan Sangh and the right-wing ideology have always been a part of Kerala’s political spectrum. Yet the party despicably failed to make inroads into electoral victories. With all his Chanakya tantra, Amit Shah failed to send his men from Kerala to the parliament, not even once.  
The BJP’s electoral politics has been consistently progressive increasing the number of votes but inadequate to make any structural impact in the state’s political scenario. In the assembly election-2021, the party managed to garner 11.3% of the total polled votes slightly increasing its vote share from 2016, which was 10.53%. Both the Left Democratic Front (LDF) headed by the CPI(M) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the Congress have always been precautious to spread wet blankets on BJP’s electoral prospects. They could engineer it by helping each other in case a BJP candidate was predicted to be the winner. The cross-voting trend in Kerala began in 1991, when K.G. Marar, a senior RSS pracharak deputed to BJP, failed to win the election from the Mancheswaram constituency by a thin margin of 1000 votes. Political revelations after the elections stunningly disclosed the secret that made Marar bite the dust. This continued in the same constituency and in many other constituencies until the last election. Again, K. Surendran, the present party president was defeated on a thin margin by the same unprincipled cross-voting and it is a worst kept secret in Kerala politics.
The BJP has consistently been upfront in trying to establish ties with the minorities especially the Christians. In a pragmatic move, the long-standing dispute between the Jacobite and Orthodox church in Kerala was brought to Narendra Modi’s table for a consensus, with the present Goa governor also a BJP veteran P.S. Sreedharan Pillai mediated it. The saffron party has made concerted efforts to make inroads among the unimpressed minority. This being the case, the party could seldom make any impulse in the direction of winning hearts of the 18.4% Christians in the state. Elections 2021 in Kerala was seen as an opportunity for the party to improve its tally, becoming a perceptible opposition in the assembly. Interestingly, the BJP enjoyed the presence of metro man E. Sreedharan, retired civil servant C.V. Ananda Bose, former IPS officers Jacob Thomas and T.P. Senkumar (both retired DGPs) and many more reputed personalities in its bandwagon. Both the IPS officers had burnt their fingers for being truthfully resisting the ruling establishment’s unwarrantable propaganda. Despite the party leadership’s reach out to the minority, a visible consolidation of votes against the BJP remains a reality in the state. Still unconvinced about the genuineness of the party’s secular credentials, the minority is still at a distance from the saffron cohort. Mostly in triangular fights, the BJP slips to triviality and the intense infighting of the party’s state leadership hammers the last nail on its coffin in every election.
Though the party manages to increase its vote share every time, the ‘zero tally’ pulls it down to the level of a chronic insignificance. The RSS initiative to lift the ailing party to a significant political pedestal has been a routine, per se. Bringing senior RSS pracharak Kummanam Rajashekharan to the party’s rescue as its state president could give the party an ideological makeover. His simplicity, commitment and soft-spoken leadership received huge acceptance. He rose to popularity in Kerala as a mass agitator for the Hindu rights. His agitations during the famous Nilakkal violence in 1982 in connection with a church being allegedly built in the forest land of Sabarimala temple and the Marad massacre of 2002 in which eight Hindus were killed by an islamists mob in the Marad beach of Kozhikode got him win a superstardom among the Hindus in the state. But internal feuds in the party could not give him a breathing space, he was later enthroned as the Mizoram governor.   The Ezhavas, the caste among the Hindus, predominantly lenient to the Communists, occupy about 24% of the state population as per the last census. The support that it extended to the left parties remained rock-hard until recently, though ripples of denial are surfacing with a slow pace. The Nairs, the second largest Hindu community comprising 14% of the population, is frequently flexible with its votes scattered among various parties. The BJP victory, with Modi taking the center stage winning elections, is still a mirage in the state of Kerala. The RSS keeps drawing discipline lines for the party leadership, but it fails to remain a unified cohort bringing good results in its electoral progress card. Winning elections in the God’s own country is still an uphill task for the BJP and Modi.
(The writer is a Freelance Journalist / Social Worker)