Election results in the State do not lend much credence to the idea of a possible consolidation of Muslim votes in favour of the Congress and the United Democratic Front (UDF) in response to perceived apprehension of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi coming to power.
The results, especially in the northern district having a significant presence of the community, show there was no massive consolidation of Muslim votes in favour of the UDF. The theory was laid bare in the Malappuram and the Ponnani Lok Sabha constituencies which are bastions of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).
While IUML candidate and incumbent E. Ahamed, whose candidature was said to have been opposed by party rank and file, won the seat with a huge margin of 1,94,739 votes, over 78,000-odd votes more than his margin in 2009, E.T. Mohammed Basheer’s margin of victory in Ponnani fell from 82,684 in 2009 to 25,410.
The new entrants in Muslim politics such as the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) and the Welfare Party of India have been able to make their presence felt in Malappuram and Ponnani, as also in other northern constituencies.
The SDPI in the Kannur constituency polled 19,170 votes, which would have largely gone to the UDF if there had been a Muslim consolidation in favour of the Congress. The only constituency where the theory can be argued to have worked is Kasaragod. The incumbent P. Karunakaran of the CPI(M) won the seat by a margin of 6,921 votes as against his margin of 64,427 votes in 2009. But the reduced margin of Mr. Karunakaran, who had won the two previous elections, is seen largely as an outcome of an anti-incumbency feeling in the electorate.
If the perceived Muslim consolidation worked, K. Sudhakaran of the Congress would have been re-elected from the Kannur constituency, and Congress candidate and incumbent M.I. Shanavas would not have got a reduced margin in the Wayanad constituency.
The result in the Kozhikode constituency does not show any consolidation of Muslim votes, rather people’s approval for good performance of the incumbent. That explains the rise in the vote margin of Congress candidate M.K. Raghavan from 838 in 2009 to 16,883 now. The same recognition of performance of the incumbent is seen as a major factor in the re-election of M.B. Rajesh of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Palakkad with a thumping margin of 1,05,300 as against his slender margin of 1,820 in 2009. Similar is the case with P.K. Biju of the CPI(M) in Alathur where he improved his margin from 20,960 votes to 37,312 votes.
