NEW DELHI // Prime minister Narendra Modi has begun campaigning for his Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of state elections in Kerala, hoping to push the BJP into a political battleground from which it has been mostly absent.
Throughout its 36-year history, the centre-right BJP has not won a single seat in the Kerala assembly or an Indian parliamentary seat from the state. But Mr Modi and his party are determined to change all this when Kerala – which has traditionally been dominated by Congress and leftist parties – votes for a new state government on May 16.
Speaking at his first rally of the Kerala campaign on Friday, the prime minister went on the offensive, accusing the BJP’s two rivals of stealing from the state.
“In the past six decades, what has been seen here is that every five years, governance changes between the Congress and the Communists,” he said. “For five years, the Congress loots, and then for five years the Communists do the same, and it continues.”
“The BJP stands for development and has a vision for it,” he said. “Change is the need of the hour in Kerala.”
The results of the election, along with those of state elections in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, will be announced on May 19.
Mr Modi is scheduled to speak at a series of rallies across Kerala, with other BJP leaders also drafted in for the campaign, including party president Amit Shah and Indian home minister Rajnath Singh.
In a state with a population that is 28 per cent Muslim, 17 per cent Christian and 55 per cent Hindu, the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda may not find much traction.
“The BJP can’t [make] any political advancement in Kerala,” Oommen Chandy, Kerala’s chief minister and a senior member of the Congress party, said on Tuesday. “Kerala’s mind is entirely different. We are for communal harmony. Kerala’s mind is not with the agenda of the BJP.”
Mr Chandy himself is facing a corruption investigation, having been accused of accepting bribes and sexual favours in return for preferential treatment of a solar power start-up. The chief minister has denied these charges, and a judicial commission is investigating the so-called “solar scam”.
But B R P Bhaskar, a Kerala-based political analyst, said he was not sure how much the taint of corruption would affect Congress’ fortunes. “It’s sometimes hard for people outside Kerala to understand this, but the really committed voters of the parties here don’t seem to care about such scandals,” Mr Bhaskar said. “I guess you could call it brand loyalty.”
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Instead, he said, the really dominant trend in Kerala’s state politics over the past 30 years has been an alternation of governments: a term for the Congress and its partners in the United Democratic Front (UDF) alliance, then a term for the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
“My interpretation is that, while both these fronts have their committed voters, there is a small but growing group of independently minded voters, and these aren’t willing to give a government more than five years in power,” Mr Bhaskar said. Since the BJP has never had a foothold in Kerala, these voters have swung between the Congress and communist-led alliances.
Mr Bhaskar dismissed the BJP’s claims of doing well enough to form Kerala’s next government, but said the party was likely to win some of the 140 seats in the assembly – perhaps even enough to deny other parties an outright majority.
Even in Kerala, far from Mr Modi’s traditional strongholds of influence, the prime minister exerts some appeal over the youth, Mr Bhaskar said. The BJP has also allied with an organisation representing the Ezhava caste, one of the largest caste in Kerala, hoping to tap into that base of voters.
As it has elsewhere in India, the BJP is also promoting itself as a party that is aggressive about economic development and business.
Pulapre Balakrishnan, an economist at Ashoka University, said the state of Kerala’s economy might encourage voters to seek change.
For decades, workers have been leaving Kerala to work in the Middle East, particularly in the UAE. As a result, the cost of labour in the state has risen, while the higher earnings of the workers abroad have pushed up the price of land.
These factors have made state less competitive for investment and industry. Kerala’s unemployment rate, at 7.4 per cent, is the third-highest among Indian states and well above the national average of 2.3 per cent.
“Successive governments have done very little to address this problem,” Dr Balakrishnan said. The lack of competitive industry in Kerala will particularly make itself felt if oil prices remain low, constricting remittances from the Middle East.
“I don’t think this is a systemic or inevitable problem at all,” Dr Balakrishnan said. “But the government does need to find a way to fix this.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae