Kerala results ‘utter disappointment’, says BJP

NEW DELHI:The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), desperately trying to open its account in Kerala, termed its rout in the state as an “utter disappointment”.

None of the BJP candidates won in the assembly elections.

The BJP’s most favoured candidate O. Rajgopal, a former central minister, was routed in Palakkad assembly constituency, finishing in the third position.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) candidate K.K. Divakaran won the seat by 1,344 votes.

“It is an utter disappointment. We expected at least one seat,” senior BJP leader Mukthar Abbas Naqvi told IANS.

Naqvi refused to attribute any reason for the poor performance. “We will review the position and find out what has gone wrong.”

Although the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fielded candidates in almost all the 140 seats, Palakkad was one of the 17 seats the BJP had thought would fall in its lap.

BJP sources, however, blamed internal squabbling to the rout.

The BJP’s vote share has seen on a slide since the 1987 assembly polls.

That year, the party managed a 6.47 percent vote share, which went to 5.53 percent in 1991, went up marginally to 5.48 percent in 1996 and again went down to 5.02 percent in 2001.

Since 1987, the Manjeswaram seat from Kasaragod district has seen BJP candidates finish in the second place.

In the 2004 parliamentary elections, BJP candidates bagged more than 25,000 votes each in seven assembly segments. In 33 segments the candidates scored more than 10,000 votes each and in 77 more than 5,000 each.

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