Kerala Assembly Election 2026: BJP defeats Left Leaders in Three Seats

In the 1990s, when Marxist EK Nayanar, then Kerala chief minister, was asked at a press conference in the national capital about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trying to make inroads into the state, he had laughed it off. Nearly two decades later, the BJP did make its first electoral foray into a state, alternately ruled by the Left and Congress, with its veteran leader O Rajagopal winning the Nemom seat, an assembly segment of the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency, in the 2016 elections.

A decade after breaking the jinx, the BJP, for the first time in history, has won as many as three of the 140 seats, defeating Left candidates. While former union minister and BJP’s state unit chief Rajeev Chandrasekhar defeated CPI (M) candidate V Sivankutty, a minister in the Pinarayi Vijayan government. Incidentally, Rajagopal had also defeated Sivankutty, in 2016, finally ensuring representation for the BJP in the state assembly.

Another former union minister in the Modi government, V Muraleedharan, a former state party chief, defeated CPI (M) MLA and minister in the previous Pinarayi Vijayan regime Kadakampally Surendran in Kazhakootam, also in Thiruvananthapuram district. Muraleedharan, who had lost from Kazhakootam in the 2016 elections, had also contested the Lok Sabha elections from Attingal in 2024 and Kozhikode in 2009, but lost to Congress candidates in both.

BJP’s BB Gopakumar won the Chathannoor seat, an assembly constituency in Kollam, defeating CPI’s R Rajendran. The BJP had come second in the 2016 and 2021 assembly elections. However, BJP’s Sobha Surendran, a prominent party face who was leading in some rounds in Palakkad, lost to Congress’ Ramesh Pisharody.

The BJP’s tally has risen to three from zero in the 2021 assembly elections, when despite capturing a vote share of around 11 percent, the BJP could not win a single seat. Sources in the BJP, however, say the results fell below the party’s expectations, given its record vote share of 19.4 percent in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when it opened its account with actor-turned-politician Suresh Gopi winning from Thrissur. The BJP also captured the Thiruvananthapuram corporation last year, securing the highest consolidated votes in Nemom, though its vote share had come down to 14.26 percent.

Critical in its expansion plans, Kerala has been posing a challenge for the BJP, which has been striving to carve a space for itself.  In the run-up to the elections, the party had decided to focus 35-40 seats, where it was expecting a significant vote share, buoyed by the performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha election and local body elections. Apart from the districts of Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam, the party concentrated on seats in Pathanamthitta, Alapuzha, Kannur, Palakad, Kozhikode and Thrissur, hoping to turn the elections into three-cornered contests.

With the mood in Kerala, however, weighing heavily against the incumbent, Pinarayi Vijayan’s Left Democratic Front (LDF), the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) swept the state.