THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The NDA candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, will win by a minimum of 15,000 votes, according to BJP’s preliminary Lok Sabha election review report presented in the leadership meeting.
The party evaluates the contest between Rajeev and his immediate opponent Shashi Tharoor of the Congress as a close one. The BJP does not see LDF finishing second in the constituency. If all the favourable conditions are realised, Rajeev’s winning margin might rise to 60,000 votes, the party reckons.
In Thrissur, the second seat BJP is counting on, NDA candidate Suresh Gopi will win by a margin of 30,000 votes, according to the party. BJP appears to be more confident of Suresh Gopi’s win from Thrissur compared to Rajeev Chandrasekhar in Thiruvananthapuram. As per the election review report, Suresh Gopi’s majority may go beyond one lakh. The Karuvannur Cooperative Bank scam and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reference to it in the election campaigns also helped BJP, the report said.
In the third seat the party hopes to win, Pathanamthitta, BJP has pinned all its hopes on the Christian minority voters in the constituency. The party believes that NDA candidate Anil Antony was successful in attracting the Christian minority votes to the BJP fold.
Apart from the 70,000 votes the party’s 2019 candidate K Surendran garnered, Anil would get an additional 60,000 Christian votes, the party calculates.
The party sees three other constituencies -- Attingal, Alappuzha and Palakkad -- as winnable, if all favourable conditions have come together. In Alappuzha, the report underlines Sobha Surendran’s influence among women voters as an important factor that might help win the seat.
The murder of Ranjith Sreenivasan had helped polarise votes in favour of the NDA candidate. In Palakkad, BJP hopes to garner between 2.98 lakh to 3.48 lakh votes. Interestingly, the report pointed out that in many constituencies across the state, the CPM workers were not active.
The report also said that even in booths there were not enough CPM workers and the squad works at the booth level were cold in the Malabar region. The BJP leadership evaluates this was due to the indifference of workers towards the second LDF government.
‘Upper caste/class CPM members voted for BJP’
BJP thinks the stoppage of welfare pensions aggravated the situation and the negative response from the voters affected the CPM badly. In addition, BJP claims that, for the first time, CPM members belonging to the upper caste and upper class have cast their votes in favour of the BJP.
