s campaigning gets to the last lap, a key question looming ahead is if and how the BJP’s newly-cobbled electoral tie-up with the SNDP Yogam and its pro-Hindutva agenda will work in the State.
The last two week’s campaign run may show that the BJP’s ratings have come down, for several wrong reasons. Its strategy of garnering anti-CPI(M) and anti-Congress votes of the Hindu sections, blue printed by its Central leadership, is apparently floundering after the initial euphoria.
Evidently, its State leaders had failed to aggressively woo the Ezhava/Thiyya community while keeping its traditional Nair vote bank intact at the same time — which was the lynchpin of the strategy. Instead, SNDP general secretary Vellappally Natesan has been practically left to fend for himself, even as the CPI(M) has deployed V.S. Achuthanandan and the KPCC, its president V.M. Sudheeran — both from the same community, and had crossed swords with Mr. Natesan on multiple occasions.
The BJP also made an apologetic spectacle of itself, letting its intra party feuds out in the open while the election was hurtling closer. It did the party’s image no good that fulminations of its top State leaders stayed on the headlines, after former BJP leaders P.P. Mukundan and K. Raman Pillai made a bid to return to the party fold.
That apart, issues elsewhere, such as the beef ban and the police raid on Kerala House further compounded things for the party in Kerala , though many of these had the involvement of fringe Hindutva outfits and not the BJP itself.
But its silver lining is that the RSS has done the groundwork for the BJP to overcome its leadership vacuum. The party can find solace in the fact that the Central leadership’s strategy of consolidating and micro-managing castes has impacted the political discourse this poll.
The BJP still holds sway over an estimated 20 per cent of the Nair, 15 per cent of Ezhava/Thiyya and other backward classes, and 6 per cent of Adivasi and Scheduled Castes votes in the State.
About 18,000 of its candidates are fighting this poll on the party’s Lotus symbol, while the Yogam has its own 900 nominees. Besides, office-bearers of several NSS Karayogams are also party contestants. In the last local bodies’ poll, the party had won 600-odd wards. It will be a huge bonus for BJP even if it bags only 2,000 and 3,000 wards, considering that it is on the cusp of making a big move against the two coalitions in the State’s traditionally bipolar polity.
