Voting will be held at all 20 Lok Sabha seats in Kerala on Friday amid tight security arrangements. The voting commenced in the South state at 7 am where the fight is predominantly between INDIA allies, CPI(M) and the Congress, in the majority seats.
People began queuing up in front of the voting booths from early morning in over 25,000 polling booths, registering a 5.62 per cent turnout in the first hour.
It is a high-voltage contest in Kerala with two Union ministers, K Muralidharan and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, in the fray. While Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will seek a reelection from Wayanad, a state minister, three actors and a few MLAs are among the candidates who are trying their luck in Kerala.
One of the seats witnessing a tight fight is the Thiruvananthapuram constituency where the Congress has fielded sitting MP Shashi Tharoor against Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the BJP candidate. The Left has fielded former CPI state secretary Panniyan Ravindran in a bid to reclaim the seat.
The Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency is predominantly urban and Tharoor enjoys significant support among the dominant Nair and Nadar communities in the constituency. But a decisive factor that helped him win the previous polls was votes from coastal areas, especially from Christians.
Citing Pannian’s campaign as "not very impactful", Tharoor himself has asserted that the battle in Thiruvananthapuram is directly between the Congress and the BJP.
But, interestingly, Chandrasekhar himself insists that the fight is triangular. After submitting his nomination on April 5, he said, "This constituency is witnessing a triangular fight; it remains to be seen who the principal opponent is." Chandrasekhar, it seems, recognises that the notion of a head-to-head contest between him and Tharoor could consolidate minority votes in Tharoor’s favour. The BJP is yet to win a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala, but it had come second in Thiruvananthapuram in 2014 and 2019.
Another constituency which has grabbed eyeballs is Wayanad, where Rahul Gandhi will take on CPI's Annie Raja and BJP state party president K. Surendran. In 2019, Gandhi defeated the CPI candidate by more than 400,000 votes, the highest margin in Kerala, although he lost his second seat to BJP in the family bastion of Amethi.
Raja has been harping on the incumbent’s absence in her campaign. Her appeal to the voters, especially women, is "Kindly give me a chance to stand with you". Raja told THE WEEK that people across Wayanad were asking her the same question.
K. Surendran, who is contesting from Wayanad and claims he will put up a tough fight (the BJP has never secured a 10 per cent vote share in the Wayanad parliamentary constituency), is also highlighting Rahul’s unavailability and has tried to club Annie in the same category. They are, in his words, "tourists to Wayanad".
The BJP is also pinning its hopes on the Thrissur constituency where actor-turned-politician Suresh Gopi’s eleventh-hour effort in 2019 had led to a significant surge in the BJP’s vote share. This year, Suresh Gopi will face Congress's K. Muraleedharan and CPI leader and former agriculture minister V.S. Sunil Kumar.
The BJP has promised that if its candidate in Thiruvananthapuram or Thrissur wins, he will be made Union minister. "In Thrissur," said political observer and academic Mohan Varghese, "the BJP must secure a considerable portion of Christian votes from the Congress to succeed, whereas in Thiruvananthapuram, even if it doesn’t secure Christian votes outright, it still requires diverting them from the Congress to the CPI to emerge victorious."
Thrissur, too, is witnessing a tight triangular contest. The Congress has fielded K. Muraleedharan, senior leader and son of former chief minister K. Karunakaran, and the CPI has fielded former agriculture minister V.S. Sunil Kumar.
(With inputs from Nirmal Jovial)