In its Palakkad bastion breached by Congress in 2019, CPM now also faces a ‘growing’ BJP

At the moment, the BJP’s only electoral presence in Kerala is at the municipality level. In Palakkad town’s 52-member municipality body, the BJP has 28 councillors. As the party looks to “open its account” in the state, which votes in the second phase of the Lok Sabha elections on April 26, the Palakkad seat is high on its agenda.

However, this Left Democratic Front (LDF) stronghold is not an easy seat to make inroads into, with the ruling CPI(M) banking on goodwill from its range of welfare policies and handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

The LDF, that has been winning the seat since 1996, had a rude shock in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when Palakkad was among the seats won by the Congress-led UDF in its 19-out-of-20 sweep of Kerala. Palakkad was clinched by the Congress’s V K Sreekandan by a margin of 11,637 votes against LDF candidate M B Rajesh, who was seeking a third term. Sreekandan is again contesting from the seat this time around.

The LDF has fielded senior CPI(M) leader and Politburo member A Vijayaraghavan, while the BJP has repeated its 2019 candidate, the party’s state general secretary, C Krishnakumar.

The BJP is taking heart from the fact that it has been improving its vote share in the seat. While its candidate Sobha Surendran, who is this time contesting from the Alappuzha Lok Sabha seat, had got 15% of the votes in Palakkad in 2014, Krishnakumar increased the number to 21.26% in 2019.

The BJP’s focus is visible, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s posters saying “a new Kerala is Modi’s guarantee” dotting most roads in the seat.

The Palakkad town also sports a new BJP district committee office building, which was inaugurated in February. The party has set up a call centre inside the building — there are seven