Dharmadam is an acknowledged pocket borough of the CPI(M). It was carved out in 2011 from parts of the erstwhile Edakkad constituency and the nearby areas.
The constituency is emotionally and politically affiliated to the party as it includes Pinarayi panchayat which covers Parapram, the birth place of Communist movement in the State, and is also the home turf of its Polit Bureau member Pinarayi Vijayan.
In the constituency’s maiden election in 2011, K.K. Narayanan of the CPI(M) won with a margin of 15,000-odd votes against his UDF rival. That margin remained nearly unchanged in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and rose to 27,000 in the last local bodies poll. There is nothing to imagine that electoral preferences in this red fortress will undergo any radical changes.
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Even as the CPI(M) treats the constituency as its own, the increase in the vote share of the BJP there over the past few elections has been a matter of concern for the LDF, though that concern does not have any immediate relevance.
In the 2009 election, the BJP’s vote share in areas that now formed the constituency was 3,232, which rose to 10,207 in 2015. For the UDF and the BJP, even a marginal increase in their vote shares here has been a cause for celebration for their respective party workers.