After Modi, Shah highlights BJP’s expansion plans in Kerala

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Shah’s visit to Kerala is significant as the BJP draws up expansion plans to end the party’s long record of electoral drought here. He also inaugurated the party's new state office in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday and attacked the ruling Left Democratic Front and opposition United Democratic Front as coalitions that had turned Kerala into a haven for violence, corruption, vote-bank politics, appeasement and anti-national elements.

He said only the NDA could serve the goal of developing Kerala.

Citing the state’s gold smuggling scam as India’s biggest ‘state-sponsored’ scam, Shah declared that in the upcoming local body elections, the NDA will contest 21,000 seats and establish a strong presence at every booth with a 25% vote share.

Sangh parivar’s hopes for reasonable political gains in Kerala arose after the party won big in Christian-dominated Nagaland and Meghalaya in 2023 and Goa in 2022.

It was then that PM Narendra Modi declared that like the north-eastern states and Goa which, despite being minority dominated, had elected the BJP governments for stability and good governance, Kerala too would soon give a chance to the BJP and its allies.

“For years, fear has been spread among the minorities about the BJP, but Goa exposed this myth. In the North-East too, the BJP is constantly gaining ground in Christian-dominated belts. As more and more myths get busted, the BJP will expand further. I am sure Kerala too, like Goa and North-East, will elect a BJP alliance government,” Modi had said on March 2, 2023.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP for the first time breached the Kerala wall with actor Suresh Gopi becoming the first-ever BJP MP from the southern state. The party is now eyeing a decent run in the 2026 Assembly polls.

But in the 2021 Assembly polls, the BJP had failed to win even a single Assembly seat though it marginally improved the vote share from 10.53 percent in 2016 to 11.30 percent in 2021.

In 2016, BJP’s O Rajagopal had won from Nemom, but in 2021, Kummanam Rajasekharan lost to a CPM candidate.

The PM’s “Kerala is next” announcement in 2023 was a cue to the BJP to go all out in Kerala, a state that returned the highest number of Congress MPs -- 15 out of 20 seats (including Rahul Gandhi from Wayanad) in 2019 and 14 out of 20 (including Priyanka Vadra in Wayanad) in 2024 -- to the Lok Sabha. A Kerala push is key to BJP’s principal political goals of a Congress-free India and pan-India BJP.