Thiruvananthapuram: With two crucial elections around the corner—the 2025 local body polls and 2026 assembly elections—Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s appointment as the new chief of Bharatiya Janata Party’s Kerala unit reflects the party’s growing aspirations in the state. Following his 2024 Lok Sabha performance, Chandrasekhar is set to replace K. Surendran, the party head in Kerala since 2020.
BJP’s Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha candidate in 2024, Chandrasekhar campaigned mostly on the promise of ‘transforming the constituency’ through IT and infrastructure development, raising the party’s vote share in the constituency from 31.30 percent in 2019 to 35.52 percent. Though he lost to United Democratic Front’s Shashi Tharoor by 16,077 votes, he pushed the Left Democratic Front’s Pannyan Raveendran to the third spot—a feat for the BJP, which is yet to make significant inroads in Kerala.
Senior BJP leader V. Muraleedharan told the media that the decision to select Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar was taken unanimously at a BJP core committee meeting Sunday in Thiruvananthapuram. “All senior leaders have signed his nomination paper. I don’t see any others filing a nomination. But the official announcement will be made by [Union Minister] Pralhad Joshi tomorrow [Monday] at the party’s state committee meeting,” he told the media after the meeting.
The BJP’s state party conference will be held Monday at the Uday Palace Convention Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.
Apart from the neck-and-neck Thiruvananthapuram battle, the BJP also clinched its first electoral victory in the Kerala Lok Sabha polls in 2024. Its candidate and actor-politician Suresh Gopi won against the LDF and the UDF by winning 74,686 votes. The party also saw a significant increase in its vote share in Kerala from 13 percent in 2019 to 16.68 per cent in 2024, according to the Election Commission (EC) data.
With this wind beneath its wings, the BJP now hopes to establish its footprint in the state, becoming a significant political player. The party expects Chandrasekhar to lead the way across Kerala, as he did in Thiruvananthapuram last year.
‘An experiment’
An entrepreneur and industrialist, Chandrasekhar was a Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka three times. Born to a Malayalee couple in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad, he also served as the minister of state for skill development and entrepreneurship in Modi 2.0 in 2021.
The BJP state vice president, advocate B. Gopalakrishnan, told ThePrint that ahead of the two elections, Chandrasekhar will become the face of the party when it tries to project its roadmap for the “new Kerala”.
Kerala’s local body polls are scheduled to be held by December this year and the state will vote for the assembly polls in 2026.
In January this year, the party did an organisational revamp appointing more women, SC/ST members, and Christians as its functionaries in mandalam (local) committees.
“BJP likes to experiment in states. This selection of a new president is also a part of it,” B. Gopalakrishnan said, adding that Chandrasekhar’s scant experience in Kerala politics will not affect the party, which has a strong cadre base willing to work for those chosen by its leadership.
“It’s a leftist view that only grassroots leaders can be party chief. Whoever is [our] party leader, [our] party cadre will stand with him. The BJP has a strong cadre base,” Gopalakrishnan said.
Though not a grassroots political leader, Chandrasekhar’s appointment is also coming amid the factionalism in the Kerala BJP unit, which had come to the fore during the crucial Palakkad by-poll in November 2024.
The party, at the time, fielded C. Krishnakumar, a close aide of K. Surendran as the Palakkad candidate. The BJP had a high chance of winning the seat due to the strong roots of the RSS. However, Congress leader Rahul Mankoottathil won the seat, with 58,389 votes, pushing the BJP to the second spot, with only 39,549 votes.
Following the loss, BJP national council member N. Sivarajan and the Palakkad municipal chairperson Pramila Sasidharan publicly questioned Krishnakumar’s candidature. Days before the polls, BJP leader Sandeep Varier too defected to the Congress due to his rift with Surendran.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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