BJP vs CPI(M) in Nemom is litmus test for Rajeev Chandrasekhar
The constituency is witnessing one of the most high-voltage contests in Kerala this time around, between Chandrasekhar and V. Sivankutty, a CPI(M) veteran and the minister for general education and labour, who wrested the Nemom seat from the BJP in 2021.
The LDF is hoping that the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government’s performance, coupled with Sivankutty’s track record and familiarity with the constituency, will help it retain the seat.
In Nemom’s case, popular sentiment on the ground, past trends, and insights from political analysts indicate that the contest could be decided by the number of votes the Congress will poll here. The party has fielded K.S. Sabarinadhan, a KPCC leader and former MLA who is now the councilor of Thiruvananthapuram’s Kowdiar ward, from this seat.
Political analyst K.P. Sethunath told ThePrint that the ruling CPI(M) has a chance of winning if Sabarinadhan secures just enough votes.
“If Sabarinadhan can get the numbers of votes that K. Muraleedharan did (in 2021), it would give Sivankutty a fair chance. Muraleedharan had experience in electioneering and reach among party cadres and the public. But getting that vote will be a turning point for Sabarinadhan, because when Sivankutty won last time (in 2021), Congress gave credit to Muraleedharan for paving the way for it,” he explained.
Sethunath added that a loss in Nemom would be a major setback for both the BJP and Rajeev Chandrasekhar. But the party may not immediately replace him, since it is playing the long game in Kerala, expanding its overall vote share with each election cycle.
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CPI(M): Betting on ‘minister appooppan’
Located adjacent to central Thiruvananthapuram, Nemom seat consists of several urban wards of the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation and the district’s coastal areas.
The Assembly constituency, which has historically supported both the Congress and the Left, was once represented by former chief minister K. Karunakaran of the Congress. It made it to the headlines once again in 2016 with the victory of BJP’s O. Rajagopal against then-incumbent MLA Sivankutty by a margin of 8,671 votes.
It was the BJP’s lone and first-ever Assembly election win in Kerala.
One of the senior-most leaders of Kerala BJP and a two-time Rajya Sabha MP, Rajagopal had contested almost 30 different elections before his first electoral win. Unlike many other BJP leaders in the state, he had a popular appeal due to his non-confrontational style. He would even appreciate political rivals on occasion, putting his party in a tough spot.
But in 2021, the BJP fielded Kummanam Rajasekharan to retain the Nemom seat. He was pitted against Sivankutty and Congress’s K. Muraleedharan. In a tight triangular contest, Sivankutty emerged victorious with a margin of 3,949 votes. But the most notable element was the difference in the number of votes polled by the Congress or the UDF candidate.
In 2016, the UDF candidate—JD(U) leader and former minister V. Surendran Pillai—secured just 13,860 votes against Sivankutty’s 59,142 and Rajagopal’s 67,813.
In 2021, however, Congress’s K. Muraleedharan increased UDF’s votes to 36,524, while the BJP’s votes dipped to 51,888 and Sivankutty’s remained almost the same at 55,837.
The local CPI(M) is counting on this electoral arithmetic.
R.P. Sivaji, CPI(M)’s Thiruvananthapuram district secretariat member from Nemom, said the LDF’s victory is a done deal if the UDF is able to retain its vote share. He said the party considers Sabarinadhan a candidate who can consolidate the Congress party’s votes.
The CPI(M)’s candidate, Sivankutty, hails from Thiruvananthapuram and is a state committee member. He started his political journey as a teenager through CPI(M)’s students’ wing SFI, rising through the ranks to become Mayor of Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, before being elected MLA from Thiruvananthapuram East constituency in 2006. After his victory in 2021, he was given the portfolio of general education and labour.
Sivankutty’s tenure as minister was showcased for reforms introduced into Kerala’s education sector during this time. Among them was introduction of gender-neutral textbooks, infrastructural upgrade of government schools, and most recently a proposed reform to reduce the weight of schoolbags and abolish the concept of backbenchers.
In 2025, Sivankutty also came out in support of the Class 8 student who was prohibited from entering a church-run school in Kochi while wearing a hijab, on account of the uniform policy. The incident had trigerred widespread criticism from Kerala’s church bodies.
“There is no need to introduce our candidate. He has been with the people of the district for a while, working and rising through the ranks from grassroots politics. Every family knows him,” said S. Pushpalatha, the CPI(M)’s campaign coordinator for Nemom, about Sivankutty. A few locals ThePrint spoke to shared this sentiment.
Biju C., a grocery shop owner in the constituency’s Mudavanmugal locality, said Sivankutty has been accessible for the constituents, was active during the floods and the pandemic, and has an efficient office which is responsive. “I went to invite him for the house-warming function. He couldn’t make it. But he sent a letter days later conveying his wishes,” Biju said, adding that the CPI(M) lost control of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation due to inaccessibility and unpopularity of then mayor Arya Rajendran and other councilors.
Technocrat ‘with a difference’
“I’m your candidate. Don’t forget to vote,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, greeting a group of women while on his way to a local temple as part of the campaign trail.
As he walked away, a middle-aged woman from the crowd remarked: “It’s for the RSS.”
Her friend, quick to jump in, replied: “He isn’t just about being RSS. There’s a difference.”
The incident captured the essence of BJP’s prospects in Nemom.
The BJP believes it has a fair chance to wrest back the seat it won in 2016, by deploying the party machinery and projecting Chandrasekhar as a technocrat who is above ‘partisan and controversial politics’.
“People know the constituency will see big changes if Rajeev Chandrasekhar wins,” said Rajesh Koliyur, a BJP functionary in Nemom, who is coordinating the party’s campaign here.
He said the BJP campaign in Kerala has a new dimension this time around—the promise of ‘Viksit Keralam’.
The party, Koliyur reasoned, couldn’t retain Nemom in 2021 as it failed to showcase its performance in the previous five years due to Rajagopal’s age. According to him, Sivankutty also benefited from the perception that he might be made a minister if he won.
Another BJP functionary in Nemom, Rajesh R., said Chandrasekhar has been able to change the BJP’s image as that of a communal party, by ensuring the presence of Christians and Muslims. “He only talks about development. Only a few talk like that. And people like that a lot. Unlike others, he might be able to bring a very big change,” he said.
Born into a Malayali family in Gujarat, Rajeev Chandrasekhar has been focused on expanding the BJP’s footprints in Kerala through campaigns centered on development and targeting the alternate UDF and LDF governments over ‘corruption’ and ‘misgovernance’.
A former Rajya Sabha MP who has previously worked with Intel and Softech, among others, Chandrasekhar has repeatedly mentioned that the BJP plans to run a ‘non-controversial’ campaign in Kerala, focused on development, though the party has more than once evoked the Sabarimala gold scandal to solicit votes from the Hindu community, addressing the CPI(M) as ‘temple thieves’ and targeting the Congress for its tie-up with Jamaat-e-Islami.
One of the first major events Chandrasekhar organised after taking over from K. Surendran as Kerala BJP president was the launch of the ‘Viksit Keralam convention’ across the party’s 30 organisational districts in the state. Unlike previous state BJP chiefs who had RSS links, he has projected himself as a leader who scaled down anti-minority rhetoric, and increased representation of functionaries from the Christian community within the party.
Chandrasekhar had contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Thiruvananthapuram, of which Nemom Assembly segment is a part, and lost to Congress’s Shashi Tharoor by a margin of 16,077 votes. Notably, Rajeev Chandrasekhar had a clear lead in the Nemom segment then, securing 61,227 votes, against Tharoor’s 39,101 votes.
The BJP is also particularly confident of win in Nemom after its victory in the 2025 local body elections, when it wrested the Thiruvananthapuram Municipal Corporation for the first time. Of the 23 ward councilors in Nemom, 17 are affiliated to the BJP.
Both BJP functionaries ThePrint spoke to also said the party launched its booth-level campaign last year, with help from the RSS. Koliyur added that the party will also benefit from the constituency’s majority Hindu population, which can prevent consolidation of minority votes against the party—a trend visible in many other Assembly seats in the state.
He said the party’s campaign in Nemom is mostly focused on meetings with key and influential voters, temple visits, and gatherings at arterial junctions.
“As politicians, we can’t say many things to voters explicitly. But the RSS can do that,” said Rajesh. According to BJP leaders, the Sangh’s grassroots campaign played a key role in BJP’s victory in the local body polls. The Sangh is also currently organising ‘Hindu Ekta Sammelans’ across the country as part of its centenary celebrations.
As for Chandrasekhar, the Kerala BJP chief had to wrestle a controversy earlier this week after the Congress alleged that he failed to disclose a luxury residence in Bengaluru’s Koramangala in his election affidavit.
“His affidavit even suggests that he owns no residential property or car despite being a billionaire businessman,” the Congress’s Kerala unit wrote on X.
Chandrasekhar again invited criticism earlier this week after ‘sanyasis’, including an ‘aghori sadhu’, landed up in Thiruvananthapuram from Uttar Pradesh to campaign for him. Soon, visuals surfaced on Malayalam TV channels and social media showing the monks blessing the BJP candidate. It opened Chandrasekhar to attacks from the Congress and CPI(M).
He responded by saying that he hadn’t invited the ‘sanyasis’ to campaign for him.
Beyond Nemom: BJP’s Thiruvananthapuram hopes
While Nemom assumes much significance due to its political history, the BJP is also eyeing victory in the district’s Kazhakkoottam constituency, where former Union minister V. Muraleedharan is up against former CPI(M) minister Kadakampally Surendran.
The party is also hoping that its candidate R. Sreelekha, a retired IPS officer, will bring about a triangular contest in the district’s Vattiyoorkavu constituency against incumbent CPI(M) MLA V. K. Prashant and senior Congress leader K. Muraleedharan.
“We don’t have so much hope in Vattiyoorkavu. But nobody has a bad opinion about Sreelekha. Similarly, in Kazhakkoottam, V. Muraleedharan has been continuously contesting. Each time, he was able to increase his votes. So we have much expectation in Kazhakkoottam,” senior Kerala BJP leader P. Asok told ThePrint. The party, he added, is hoping that a ‘Hindu wave’ spurred by the Sabarimala scandal would work in its favour.
Starting fromt the 1980s, BJP has over the years built a strong cadre base in Thiruvananthapuram, with help from RSS. It led to the formation of Hindu Munnani, a Right-wing outfit not averse to using violence, in 1980 in bordering Kanniyakumari.
The Munnani fielded Kerala Varma Raja, of the Travancore royal family, in the 1984 general election from Thiruvananthapuram and secured 19.80 percent of the vote, behind the Congress (43 percent) and Lok Dal (33.41 percent). Though BJP fielded its own candidate P. Ashok Kumar in 1989, he got only 7.47 percent of the votes. Slowly, the party increased its vote share, which also resulted in a gradual erosion in the Congress’s vote share.
For instance, Tharoor’s victory margin in Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat, which was 16,077 against Rajeev Chandrasekhar in 2024, was close to one lakh votes in 2009.
CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP A.A. Rahim summed it up thus: “BJP can’t win any seat in Thiruvananthapuram district without the help of the Congress.”
Confident of Sivankutty trouncing Chandrasekhar in Nemom seat this time around, Rahim added, “We will close the account they (BJP) opened in 2016 in Nemom.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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