After PM's cue, BJP spanner: Congress-CPM will ally in Kerala next

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, March 4

Following the Left and Congress coalition’s debacle in Tripura and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cue for expansion in south India, the BJP on Saturday threw a fresh spanner at the opposition allies predicting that they would ally in Kerala next.

“The two friends have a lot to hide in Kerala. The ruling LDF is battling the impact of the SNC Lavalin scam, the gold smuggling case, and troubles within the chief minister’s office. An alliance of Congress and Left will help both. Rahul Gandhi can secure his Wayanad parliamentary seat and CM Pinarayi Vijayan can silence the opposition Congress over the scams haunting his government,” BJP’s senior leader Tom Vadakkan said, predicting that the two parties “will ally in the southern states after similar though failed experiments in Tripura and West Bengal”.

The BJP’s remarks are strategic. They follow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s declaration that after the minority-dominated northeast, Kerala will vote the BJP and allies to power.

The BJP’s Kerala push comes parallel to the party’s consistent attack against Popular Front of India which was banned by the Centre recently and allegations of the opposition being hand-in-glove with the “anti-national group”.

The timing of Vadakkan’s remarks is significant too with BJP leaders privately admitting to a “growing sense of unease in Kerala around love jihad, land jihad and drug menace and a gradual soaring of sympathy for the BJP”.

In this context, BJP leaders hammer Congress veteran AK Antony’s recent advice to party workers to “be alert and to take the majority community along in the fight against fascism”.

“What did AK Antony mean? Who are the fascists here? It is anyone’s guess,” a BJP stalwart said.

Months after Antony’s statement, his son Anil Antony quit the Congress, slamming the party’s position on the BBC documentary on Gujarat riots.

“There is a clear ongoing churn in Kerala politics and a clear unease about the way things are. Minority appeasement politics of the LDF and Left has an expiry date whereas PM Modi’s agenda of development is beyond religion. Northeast and Goa have shown Christians voting for the BJP. Kerala is next because love jihad, land jihad, drugs and other such issues are troubling the Christians in Kerala,” a senior BJP Kerala leader told The Tribune.

For the BJP, time is ripe for an aggressive southern push considering Karnataka is the only state where it has ever formed a government.

“Even in the northeast we formed our first government only in 2016, in Assam,” a leader says, admitting that Kerala is a tough nut to crack for saffron forces but not beyond their reach.

In the 2021 assembly polls, the BJP failed to win even a single assembly seat but marginally improved its vote share from 10.53% in 2016 to 11.3% in 2021.

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

The PM’s announcement on Friday that “Kerala will be the next state to vote the BJP and allies to power” is now a cue to the party to go all out in a state that returned the maximum Congress MPs to Lok Sabha in 2019 — 15 out of 20 seats (including Rahul Gandhi’s Wayanad).

An electoral push in Kerala is key to BJP’s two principal urges – a Congress-free India and a pan-India BJP.