KASARAGOD: The closer the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) comes to Manjeshwar, the farther the constituency moves away from the saffron party. Since 1991 when BJP stalwart KG Marar contested in the constituency and lost by 1,071 votes, Manjeshwar continues to remain a mirage for the party, imprisoned in the No. 2 slot.
Though from the outside, Manjeshwar looks like an easy pluck for the BJP, the reality is the party has plateaued in the constituency.In 1991, the BJP’s vote share was 34.45 per cent. Today, after the byelection, the party’s vote share was 35.32 per cent, an increase of just 0.87 per cent in nearly three decades.
“The votes we got now are all party votes. We were not able to attract neutral voters in Manjeshwar,” said Ravisha Tantri Kuntar, the BJP candidate, who lost to Indian Union Muslim League’s MC Kamaruddin in the byelection by a margin of 7,923 votes on Thursday.
In 2016, the BJP was on the cusp of victory, losing out by just 89 votes to P B Abdul Razak of IUML. The byelection was necessitated following the demise of Razak on October 20, 2018.
In 2016, BJP candidate K Surendran polled 56,781 votes, with a vote share of 35.80 per cent. In the 2019 byelection, when BJP fielded Kuntar, an RSS insider, the party saw its vote share dip by half a per cent to 35.32 per cent.
Compared to the BJP’s performance in the Lok Sabha (Manjeshwar segment) poll in May, the party saw its vote share drop by 0.17 per cent in the byelection. In both the elections, BJP had fielded Kuntar. In contrast, the IUML, which was neck and neck with the BJP in 2016, increased its vote share by 4.33 per cent to 40.19 per cent.
The subtle player in the astounding performance of the UDF is the Left Democratic Front (LDF).
Whether by accident or design, LDF candidate M Shankar Rai cut the BJP both ways in the byelection. Rai, a member of the prominent Bunts community, got a vote share of 23.49 per cent, a drop by 3.35 per cent compared with the 2016 Assembly election.
“It is possible that Rai was able to attract the ‘neutral votes’ in Bunts community, which traditionally vote for the BJP,” said Kuntar. “But what is certain is that the Muslim supporters of the LDF voted for Kamaruddin. They were scared by the 89-vote margin of last time,” he said.
But the Left dismissed the election as a victory of communal politics. “The result is a setback for secularism. Politics was defeated, communal politics won,” said CPM district secretary M V Balakrishnan. He said the BJP and the IUML used communal identity for campaigning, and lack of development was not raised as an issue.