Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati on Monday asserted that her party will contest the assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry on its own, saying the BSP has had a bitter experience of aligning with other parties in the past.
In Ernakulam, both fronts have a point to prove
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In 2019, T.J. Vinod managed to defeat LDF candidate by a small margin
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In 2019, T.J. Vinod managed to defeat LDF candidate by a small margin When he began formally campaigning on Sunday, T.J. Vinod, the United Democratic Front (UDF) candidate in Ernakulam constituency, may have struggled to shrug away memories of a rainy day in 2019.
Two years ago, on a day when it rained heavily and the majority of voters chose to stay indoors, the voter turnout in Ernakulam dropped to an all-time low of 56%. The results delivered a shock to the UDF as Mr. Vinod managed to get past his nearest rival by a margin of just 3,673 votes, the lowest winning margin for a Congress candidate from the UDF stronghold. Despair gripped the Left Democratic Front (LDF) camp as they lost the seat between the cup and the lip.
Kerala is famous for electing the Left Democratic Front and United Democratic Front by rotation. That tradition is going to be broken. I join those who predict that Pinarayi Vijayan will win the coming election and stay on in office, making him the first Kerala chief minister to enjoy a continuum of power.
And that will be good for the state. No chief minister has blossomed the way Vijayan has. He is hardly the communist party boss he started out as. He is now a leader of all people, easily the best chief minister in the country. (There are some laughable surveys that mention Yogi Adityanath as the best chief minister. Poor guy. Can’t even ensure basic law and order in his state.) Pinarayi Vijayan’s uniqueness has already attracted world attention. The research think tank, Public Affairs Centre, picked Vijayan’s Kerala for the Best Governed State Award for three consecutive years from 2016.
KC (M) chairman Jose K Mani said his party decided to cede the seat to the CPM taking into account the peculiar political situation that emerged in Kuttiyadi.