The victorious 10 Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidates and the one LDF-supported independent candidate together bagged a record 51 per cent share of the polled votes in Kollam, district secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] K.N. Balagopal has said.
“It is the first time that the LDF is sweeping Kollam district in the Assembly election.”
While thanking the voters of Kollam for supporting the LDF candidates, Mr. Balagopal in a statement said that the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidates together had got only below 47 per cent of the polled votes in the district.
He said in the 11 constituencies together, the LDF had got 2,65,530 votes more than the UDF.
The elections results showed that the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) was taught a befitting lesson by the voters for that party’s politics of betrayal. The party left the LDF only because of the selfish parliamentary ambitions of one of its leaders, he alleged.
Communal agenda
Mr. Balagopal alleged that the five years of UDF rule was a miserable failure marked by anti-people policies. The BJP, he alleged, had a communal agenda for Kerala and wanted to take that forward through the Bharatiya Dharma Jana Sena of the SNDP Yogam. The LDF in general and the CPI(M) in particular had exposed these factors for the people to see and understand.
This was the main cause for the thumping victory registered by the LDF this time, he said.
The results also exposed that the secret understanding reached between the BJP and the UDF had flopped. But such an understanding had produced some results in the Chathannur constituency where the Congress secretly supported the BJP candidate in lieu of getting BJP support in other constituencies.
At Chathannur the UDF got only 22 per cent of the polled votes share while the Bharatiya Janata Party got 25 per cent of the share.
In the 2011 Assembly election, the vote share of the BJP was just 3 per cent while that of the UDF was 42 per cent, Mr. Balagopal said.
