Meticulous planning and systematic door-to-door campaigns at the booth- level helped Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) national president P.A. Mohamed Riyas win a huge mandate in the Beypore Assembly constituency.
Mr. Riyas who contested on the CPI(M) ticket secured leads in the Kozhikode Corporation, including the erstwhile Cheruvannur-Nallalam grama panchayat, Ramanattukara and Feroke municipalities, and Kadalundi grama panchayat. Incidentally, the United Democratic Front (UDF) is in power in both the municipalities.
CPI(M) sources said the micro-managed campaign keenly monitored both by the district and State committees of the party gave Mr. Riyas a bigger victory margin than his precursor and popular leader V.K.C. Mammed Koya in the 2016 Assembly polls.
Mr. Koya, a former Mayor and industrialist, who had also represented the segment in 2001-2006, had secured a margin of 14,363 votes against his nearest rival M.P. Adam Mulsi of the Congress.
However, in this poll, Mr. Riyas doubled the margin, polling 28,747 more votes than Congress nominee P.M. Niyas in the segment. He received 49.73% of the popular vote, 82,165 EVM and 1,660 postal votes out of the 1,65,210 total votes.
Sources said the party machinery focussed on electioneering in Beypore more than other segments in the district following rumours of strong undercurrents against Mr. Riyas, who had entered the fray after a hiatus following the electoral debacle in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. He was also unsuccessful in the civic polls in 2005.
In Beypore, Hindus and Muslims equally share the demographic profile. It is considered to be an unbreachable red fortress even when the Congress-League-BJP alliance failed to pull off a victory in the 1991 Assembly polls.
In the December 2020 local body polls, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) had got 71,150 votes; UDF, 56,063 and the BJP, 26,428.
However, Mr. Niyas alleged that the BJP had transferred votes to get Mr. Riyas elected from the constituency. The number of votes polled by BJP State secretary K.P. Prakash Babu who ran for the second time in Beypore went down by 1,691 votes compared to the 2016 polls. He received only 26,267 votes. And, that too when the party claimed that it had enrolled around 5,000 new voters this time, Mr. Niyas alleged.
