The shifting of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) votes in favour of the United Democratic Front (UDF) candidate resulted in the poor performance of the BJP in Thripunithura, alleged K.S. Radhakrishnan, the party candidate and party State vice president.
Except for the personal votes garnered by him, the traditional BJP votes were not polled in his favour, which resulted in the party vote share taking a dip, and him losing the election, said Mr. Radhakrishnan.
There has been a dent in the vote share of the party from the Thripunithura municipal area, a party stronghold.
All that the party candidate got in the constituency was the votes polled in his favour and not the votes of the BJP or the RSS. Had the votes of the BJP and the RSS been polled in favour of the candidate along with the personal votes, the electoral outcome would have been different, said Mr. Radhakrishnan.
“The party hoped to get over 60,000 votes polled in its favour in the constituency on the assumption that all the BJP-RSS votes would be polled in the election symbol lotus, along with the personal votes I could attract as a candidate, which proved wrong,” he said.
The revelations of the BJP candidate are likely to raise a storm in the party as Thripunithura was considered a winnable seat for the party.
Incidentally, Thripunithura was one of the Assembly constituencies which the party had earlier identified for E. Sreedharan, as the party had high hopes of winning the constituency. Mr. Radhakrishnan became the choice of the BJP after Mr. Sreedharan opted for Palakkad.
Mr. Radhakrishnan, while pointing out that the vote share of the Left Democratic Front candidate M. Swaraj had remained intact, said the shift in BJP-RSS votes had done the magic for K. Babu, the Congress candidate. Other than Mr. Babu, no Congress candidate in the State had openly declared that he would get RSS votes. The posters that appeared in the constituency urging Hindu voters not to vote for the BJP candidate to ensure the defeat of the LDF candidate was part of that strategy, he said.
