THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even as assessment and theories fly thick and fast in favour and against the NDA in the assembly election, the
BJP camp is confident about winning minimum three seats.
If the discussions in LDF and UDF are mostly around the possibility of either of them coming to power with a comfortable, if not wafer-thin majority, the best of the possibilities that leaders in the NDA camp nurse is a hung assembly in which NDA may emerge as a decisive factor.
The assembly segment-level calculations done by BJP on the ground level, in almost all seats, predicted chances in high number of seats. However, the leadership is not ready to go by those figures. It would wait for the assessment of RSS functionaries who were in charge of each of the seat to deduce a realistic figure from the ground reports.
Several state-level leaders of BJP shared the opinion that if there was a favourable political tilt towards BJP, the numbers could even crossfrom three to 15. A realistic assessment, say many, is that BJP candidates hold a 50:50 chance in winning at least six seats where BJP candidates took LDF or UDF, head on.
Some senior leaders said BJP is hopeful of winning Manjeswaram where the party president K
Surendran had almost got through in 2016. “A detailed review has proven that close to 300 BJP votes were not polled in the election in 2016 when Surendran lost the seat for 89 votes. The vote trade allegations that CPM and
Congress leaders trade against each other in Manjeswaram is seen as a good indicator in favour of BJP,” said a BJP state committee member.
The seat that BJP is confident of a win after Manjeswaram and Nemom is Palakkad where E Sreedharan has put up a spirited fight against Congress’ sitting MLA Shafi Parambil. The constituencies which the BJP think can go either way are Kazhakkoottam, Thrissur, Chathannoor, Malampuzha, Vattiyoorkavu and Thiruvananthapuram. BJP had either come second in all except Thrissur seat in the 2016 elections. However, since actor and MP
Suresh Gopi had won votes in large numbers from Thrissur in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the party lays high hopes in the seat. BJP leaders are also of the opinion that the decision to field K Surendran in two seats has helped the party to avoid religious and political consolidation against him in Manjeswaram.
In all these seats, BJP has a solid and sizeable vote share and victory in these seats could be counted as hard earned, political ones. If the
Sabarimala issue has clicked in favour of BJP, the number of seats the party would get would be much more. The BJP core committee is expected to meet next week after its state president K Surendran is back in the state capital by this weekend.