The drumbeats of the approaching Lok Sabha elections in 2024 appear to get louder each passing day in Kerala. On Friday, news trickled in from New Delhi that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has tasked former Union Minister Prakash Javedekar to prepare the party’s State unit for the parliamentary polls.
The BJP also reportedly removed its national vice president, A.P. Abdullahkutty, from the charge of the party's Lakshadweep unit and supplanted him with Radha Mohan Agarwal.
Kerala is a perennial political battlefield for the CPI(M)-led LDF and Congress-led UDF. The BJP hopes to shift the status quo significantly in 2024. It has a definite eye on Kerala’s Christian votes. The party had empathised with the Church’s concern about the so-called “Love and Narcotic Jihad”.
The BJP hopes to make the Lok Sabha elections in Kerala a referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's development and security agenda.
The central plank of its campaign is Kerala's economic development. Kerala's caste and communal demographics would inform candidate selection for the three fronts.
The UDF is not far behind. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra will enter Kerala on September 11. The Congress believes that Mr. Gandhi's candidature from Wayanad in the 2020 Lok Sabha elections was a game changer that boosted the party's fortunes in Kerala.
Mr. Gandhi will foot it through Kerala for nearly three weeks. Congress thinks Mr. Gandhi's campaign would energise party rank and file and lay the ground for the Lok Sabha poll campaign.
The Congress believes that the UDF has a home-field advantage, given its strong showing in the previous parliamentary elections. The Congress and the CPI(M) might find common ground in attempting to shift the political narrative against the Modi government.
Both fronts would focus on the growing economic inequality, price rise, unemployment and inflation. The parties would also try to cash in on the political upheaval surrounding touchy issues such as the Citizenship Amendment Act and alleged misuse of UAPA to stifle dissent.
The CPI(M) is catching up. By some accounts, the party has assigned its Ministers to attend preparatory mandalam committee meetings in their respective districts.
LDF primarily aims for mass political mobilisation against "rising economic inequality, the sundering of India's secular social fabric, the spiralling cost of living, concentration of power in the Central government and BJP's misemployment of Constitutional agencies as weapons to wreak political vendetta".
