As BJP prepares to breach Kerala bastion, who is Suresh Gopi, its Thrissur candidate?

Thrissur njan edukkuva (I am taking Thrissur), Enikku venom Thrissur (I want Thrissur). That’s the slogan with which BJP’s Thrissur candidate, actor-politician Suresh Gopi, led his election campaign this time. And it appears to have worked. Early trends show that Gopi, who’s been repeated by the BJP this Lok Sabha election despite having lost the previous one, could secure a historic victory at Thrissur.

Gopi, a Malayalam movie star, is leading by 73,573 votes against Communist Party of India’s B S Sunil Kumar at 1 pm, according to the Election Commission of India’s website. Also in the race is former Congress MP K Muraleedharan.

For the BJP, this win could be crucial — this is the first time that the party would clinch a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala, a state thus far elusive to the party. Thrissur is one of the seats that the BJP has been focusing on this election.

For 65-year-old Gopi too, this win is significant: not only did he lose the parliamentary seat to Congress’s T. N. Prathapan in the 2019 Lok Sabha, but he also unsuccessfully fought the 2021 Kerala assembly polls from here.

It was in October 2016 — months after he joined the BJP — that the party nominated Gopi to Rajya Sabha. Since then, Gopi had been one of the party’s star campaigners in Kerala and could attract huge crowds due to his tinsel-town image. As a result, despite having finished the 2019 polls third behind the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front, he created ripples in that election.

Thrissur is one of the few seats in Kerala where the BJP was hoping for a three-cornered contest in the state’s otherwise bipolar politics. This was because, in 2019, Gopi secured 8.2 percent vote share — a significant increase from the