New Delhi:

The focus will be on Kerala during the Phase 2 voting of Lok Sabha elections 2024 as all 20 seats in this southern state go to polls on April 26.

One of the most keenly watched constituencies in this phase will be in the serene backwater gateway of Alappuzha where Rahul Gandhi’s trusted aide KC Venugopal will try to wrest his stronghold back from the CPM’s AM Ariff. It will also witness the BJP’s Sobha Surendran challenge the Left-Congress binary that the state has traditionally voted for.

Mr Venugopal is not new to Alappuzha, a constituency he has represented twice (2009-2019) in the Lok Sabha. He did not contest the 2019 elections since he was playing a key role in the Congress’s overall strategy.

His absence marked a stark political vacuum in Alappuzha, which became the only seat to be clinched by the CPM even as Congress swept the state, winning 19 out of 20 seats, in the 2019 general elections.

The move to bring him back to his old constituency is an attempt to regain the lost stronghold from the CPM, which remains a Congress rival in Kerala though the two parties have joined hands at the national level.

Mr Venugopal, who has been a junior minister for power and civil aviation in the Manmohan Singh cabinet, has strong electoral stats: he has won the Alappuzha Lok Sabha seat twice and recorded a hattrick in the Alappuzha assembly seat (1996-2009).

The Congress general secretary has projected a sweep by the UDF, the regional alliance that it leads, and zero seats for the BJP in the state, besides a victory for himself.

Last year, Mr Venugopal was appointed as a member of the Coordination Committee of the INDIA bloc. Before entering national politics, he won the assembly elections thrice and served as a Dewaswom and tourism minister in the Oommen Chandy cabinet in Kerala.

His CPM rival, AM Ariff has been repeated to defend his seat, banking on the strong performance of the Left parties in the 2021 assembly elections. In 2019, he defeated the Congress’s Shanimol Usman, a loss that came after KC Venugopal chose not to contest. He is among the three Lok Sabha MPs that the CPM has, and the only one from Kerala.

As many as 194 candidates, including 25 women, will be contesting in the 20 seats that go to polls on April 26. The state has a total electorate of 2.8 crore. The results will be counted together for all 543 constituencies on June 4.

New Delhi:

The second of seven phases of the Lok Sabha polls will take place on Friday and the stage is set for exciting contests in some of the 88 constituencies across 13 states and Union Territories where votes will be cast.

Here’s A Look At Five Gripping Fixtures:

Rahul Gandhi Vs Annie Raja 

Polling will be carried out in all 20 seats in Kerala and the state will see some of the most-watched face-offs. In Wayanad, sitting MP and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will contest for the second time and his primary opponent in the largely bipolar state is the CPI’s Annie Raja. While it is unclear whether Mr Gandhi will also contest from Amethi, the Gandhi family bastion where he suffered a shock defeat in 2019 to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, winning this seat will be crucial for the Congress leader either way.

In 2019, Mr Gandhi had defeated the CPI candidate from Wayanad, PP Suneer, by a margin of over 4 lakh votes.

Ms Raja, a member of the national executive of the CPI and the wife of party general secretary D Raja, has criticised Rahul Gandhi and promised more consistent representation. The CPM-led LDF government in the state has also been critical of Mr Gandhi and the attacks against him have been led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, drawing counter-attacks from the Congress. 

The sharp exchanges are all the more significant given that the Congress and the Left Front are partners in the INDIA bloc at the Centre but are giving no quarter to each other in their battle in the state. The Congress had won 15 of the 20 seats in 2019.

Giving the contest another interesting dimension is that the BJP has fielded its state president K Surendran from Wayanad as part of a concerted effort to open its Lok Sabha account in the state and do better in the south in general. In an earlier interview with NDTV, Mr Surendran said he stood a good chance of winning the seat because people are disappointed with the work done by Rahul Gandhi. 

Shashi Tharoor Vs Rajeev Chandrasekhar

About 400 km south of Wayanad lies Kerala’s capital of Thiruvananthapuram, which is going to see a battle of heavyweights. The Congress’ Shashi Tharoor, a three-time MP from the constituency, will face off against Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. 

Despite having held the seat for three terms, Mr Tharoor is seen as a popular MP and has previously said that the only way the BJP’s claim of winning seats in the double digits in Kerala can be true is if both digits are zero. “The issue with the BJP is that they don’t understand Kerala’s history and culture… Communalism cannot go beyond a small limit here,” he had said. 

Mr Chandrasekhar, who is making his electoral debut, has said Mr Tharoor has failed to get any work done in the constituency and that the contest would be between the “politics of performance” – a reference to the BJP-led central government’s work – and “15 years of non-performance”

The third most-watched candidate from the seat is the CPI’s Pannyan Raveendran, a veteran leader who was the MP from Thiruvananthapuram – winning a bypoll in 2005 – before Mr Tharoor began his winning streak. The CPI leader had also contested the Kerala Assembly polls in 2011, but lost to a Congress leader. 

KC Venugopal Vs AM Ariff

Alappuzha is the only seat in Kerala that the CPM had won in 2019 and what makes the constituency even more interesting is that it will see a contest between senior Congress leader KC Venugopal, who was elected from there in 2009 and 2014, and the sitting MP, the CPM’s AM Ariff.

Mr Venugopal, who is a Rajya Sabha MP and the General Secretary (Organisation) of the Congress, had decided not to contest the Lok Sabha polls in 2019 because he had larger responsibilities and said he is doing so this time because Congress workers want him to. 

The sitting MP, Mr Ariff, has released a 12-page booklet listing out his achievements, many of which have been claimed by the Congress and the BJP as their own. He has also dismissed the Congress’ claim of winning all 20 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state and alleged that the party does this during every election.

The third key candidate in the seat is the BJP’s Sobha Surendran, who has said the people will vote for her to make her part of PM Narendra Modi’s team. “During the UPA tenure, India’s economy was down like those of Pakistan and Sri Lanka in recent times. But ten years under Narendra Modi’s rule and India has become the fifth largest economy,” she was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Arun Govil vs Sunita Verma 

Over in Uttar Pradesh, eight of whose 80 constituencies are going to the polls in the second phase, Meerut is seeing a fight in which one of the contestants is being worshipped, literally, by some supporters. The BJP’s Arun Govil played the role of Lord Ram in the popular TV series Ramayan and, despite the godlike status accorded to him by some, he faces a tough contest in the seat from the Samajwadi Party’s Sunita Verma and the BSP’s Devvrat Tyagi. 

Mr Govil, who is making his electoral debut and lives in Mumbai, has been criticised for being an outsider and has admitted that he does not have a very strong understanding of local issues, but has promised to move to Meerut and speak to people to understand their problems after he is elected. The BJP, which had won 62 of UP’s 80 constituencies in 2019, will be fancying its chances in Meerut where it has been on a winning streak since 2009 and has won a total of six times. 

The main contender against Mr Govil is the Samajwadi Party’s Sunita Verma, who is a former mayor of the city. The finalisation of the face by the party, however, was a long-drawn-out affair and involved two declared candidates – Bhanu Pratap Singh and Atul Pradhan – being dropped. Ms Verma was earlier with the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Tejasvi Surya Vs Sowmya Reddy

The Bengaluru South Lok Sabha constituency, which has elected only BJP candidates since 1991, will see a battle between Tejasvi Surya and the Congress’ Sowmya Reddy. Mr Surya was elected with a margin of over 3 lakh votes in 2019, but the Congress is hoping that Ms Reddy’s pedigree – she is the daughter of state transport minister Ramalinga Reddy – and the party’s winning performance in the Assembly polls last year will swing things in its favour.

Mr Surya, 33, who is the national president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the youth wing of the BJP,  has expressed confidence that his work towards improving Bengaluru’s infrastructure will win him another term. Another thing that is working in the BJP’s favour is that the Congress has emerged victorious in the constituency only once since 1977, when former chief minister R Gundu Rao was elected in the 1989 Lok Sabha polls. 

Ms Reddy, 41, is banking on the Congress’ guarantees, which had helped it win last year’s Assembly elections, to help it buck the trend. The Congress leader is a former MLA from Jayanagar and lost the constituency by just 16 votes was heart-broken when she lost by a mere 16 votes in her re-election bid in this city constituency in the Assembly elections last year.

Claiming that people are disappointed with Mr Surya because he has not been accessible and did not speak up for Karnataka in Parliament, Ms Reddy told PTI, “All he (Mr Surya) has been doing is spreading hate and doing divisive politics.” 

Congress’s KC Venugopal — candidate from Kerala’s Alapuzzha — has expressed confidence that the party would have a better performance this time, despite contesting the lowest number of seats ever across India. It would sweep Kerala, do better in other southern states and even in the Hindi heartland, where its presence is minimal, he claimed.  

The Congress, he made it clear, is hoping win all 20 seats in Kerala, will sweep Tamil Nadu where the party is in alliance with the DMK.

“We won 20 seats in Kerala last time. We lost one seat. We will win all 20 this time,” Mr Venugopal told NDTV in an exclusive interview given while on the campaign trail.

Like 2014 and 2019, the BJP would not be able to open its account in the state, he added. “People there know about the current political situation. They will stand against the BJP,” he added, without going into details.

The prospect is bright in other southern states too, he claimed.

In Karnataka, it would a “good battle” with the party winning 15 to 20 seats out of 28. In Telangana it would be 12-plus seats. “Andhra we have started fighting and should win one or two seats,” he added.

Asked about the showing of the party in the Hindi heartland, Mr Venugopal said the performance will be far better in the northern states, including Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

In the Hindi heartland, the “situation totally changed,” Mr Venugopal insisted. “Day by day the situation is changing. Bihar, Uttar Pradesh changing.  Comfortable number will come from Bihar, UP,” he said.

The Congress numbers in Uttar Pradesh, a state it once dominated, had for long shrunk to Gandhi pocketboroughs of Amethi and Raebareli out of 80 seats.

In 2019, Rahul Gandhi lost Amethi to Smriti Irani, bringing the number down to one. This time, the party is yet to announce candidates for either seat. There is huge expectation that the Gandhi siblings will contest both.   

In Bihar, the party won a single seat in 2019. The contest in both states are with the INDIA alliance partners – Samajwadi Party in UP and Tejashwi Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar.

Asked why the party is contesting the lowest number of seats since inception, Mr Venugopal said the “current political scenario is very dangerous”.

There is no level playing field… There are ED raids… media space has been captured,” he said. Under the circumstances, the party’s priority is to push the BJP out of power.

But he denied that the Congress was acting like the “big brother” in the INDIA alliance. “We are committed to defeating the BJP,” he added.

New Delhi:

In a sign of the Congress’s focus on the southern states, where it is perceived to be in a much stronger position than arch-rival BJP, the party has decided to field KC Venugopal from Alappuzha in Kerala despite him being a sitting Rajya Sabha MP.

Mr Venugopal, who had held the seat since 2009, had opted not to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections because he was playing a key role in the Congress’ overall strategy for all 543 constituencies. The Congress had ended up losing the seat to the CPM that year.

When he was asked why he was contesting the Lok Sabha polls again, the Congress General Secretary said on Friday, “Brother, our priority is to win the maximum Lok Sabha seats to defeat Narendra Modi in the next elections. Our target is to win the maximum number of parliament seats for the Congress party.”

Seen as a top organisation man as well as the right-hand man of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Mr Venugopal has been a three-time MLA and a two-term MP. He was a cabinet minister in the Kerala government as well as a junior minister in the Union government twice. 

In the list of 39 candidates announced by the Congress on Friday, 16 are from Kerala. Apart from Mr Venugopal, another name that stands out is that of Shashi Tharoor, who will be contesting from Thiruvananthapuram.

Mr Tharoor, who has held the seat since 2004, will face off against Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar of the BJP, who will be making his electoral debut. 

The Congress is in power in three states in the south – Karnataka and Telangana, where it has a majority on its own, and Tamil Nadu, where it shares power with the DMK. 

The BJP, on the other hand, does not have a government in any southern state. It had also won only 29 of the 129 seats (130 including Puducherry). These had come from Karnataka and Telangana, where it is expected to face a stiffer challenge this time around.