[Interview] Meet Sobha Surendran: BJP Candidate Taking On Most Powerful Congress General Secretary In LDF Fortress

For the first time ever, a large number of Indians are extremely curious to know if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will force a material breach into the deep south in 2024.

Will the BJP win a few parliamentary seats in Tamil Nadu and Kerala? Will its vote share cross 20 per cent in both states?

Opinion polls predicting scattered victories for the BJP in this region are now followed by excited, remarkably well-informed, data-driven online chatter in other parts of the country. Can K Annamalai win in Coimbatore? Can Rajeev Chandrashekhar defeat Shashi Tharoor of the Congress in Thiruvananthapuram?

A good example of the BJP’s new-found ability to get its message of development to resonate with a larger number of voters in the deep south, is Alappuzha constituency in coastal Kerala, where its candidate, Shobha Surendran, is running a scorching election campaign.

According to a Swarajya ground report, Surendran and the BJP are set to make a mark in the constituency. This time, both her opponents, A M Ariff, the sitting Marxist MP, and K C Venugopal of the Congress, who won from here in 2009 and 2014, are being pushed to the wall in a triangular contest.

The candidate expounded on her approach during a lengthy interaction in Alappuzha, and offered some interesting reasons on why her campaign is gaining traction.

She asks if this writer knows that many young women from the region are now working in Saurashtra.

Apparently, there has been a steady decline of the fishing and shrimp farming industry in Alappuzha because of state government neglect.

As a result, these women, who used to work as shrimp peelers here, have had to leave their families behind and take up similar jobs in Gujarat.

For years, successive state governments had promised a harbour along the Alappuzha coast, where the catch could be landed, sold and dispatched. But apathy and incompetence have ensured that this harbour remains a distant dream.

As a result, it makes the locals’ catch cost-prohibitive, since the fish have to be landed at harbours much farther to the north, near Ernakulam (where they also have to contend with official corruption and intimidation by competitors).

In the past, Alappuzha was renowned for its coir industry. But today, thanks to decades of socialism and communism, the district coir board has all but shut shop, leaving a large number of households without income.

Surendran has promised that all three sectors will be revived, and that Alappuzha will get its harbour. In addition, she says that the more pressing problem of coastal zone erosion would also be addressed scientifically through multiple means, including the construction of groynes. The message is: the Pinarayi Vijayan government may not be doing what is needed, but a Narendra Modi government will.

Is the approach working? She says yes, emphatically. The BJP’s popularity has risen considerably among the coastal community. (Swarajya tested the statement via a long drive along the coast, and found BJP banners and flags in every nook and corner.)

A second tack is highlighting the significance of direct benefit transfer — a major policy success of the Modi government, whereby, central assistance is provided directly to the recipient. According to Surendran, there is widespread popular acceptance that this has cut out local interference — for long, the bane of welfare spending under Congress rule at the Centre.

At every meeting with voters, she highlights the Modi government’s achievements in the welfare sector. It is a long list: rations, water, cooking gas, toilets, medicines, a Jan Dhan bank account, and houses. And then she contrasts that with the abject inability of previous central governments, and the incumbent communist state government, to achieve even a fraction of this.

“The communists have become the bourgeoisie now!”, she remarks sharply. So, has that made the BJP the party of the common people? She nods, and smiles.

In proof, she points out that 50 Christian families in Mullackal, a part of Alappuzha town, joined the BJP on 14 April, the day Kerala celebrates its Vishu festival. The Christian outreach programme of the BJP, spearheaded by the Prime Minister, appears to be working.

And what about her opponents? Both are corrupt, clueless, and conveniently connive together when the need arises; Alappuzha, Surendran says, is a perfect microcosm of the national opposition INDI Alliance.

First, she has publicly alleged that Venugopal is involved in a scam with the local mining mafia, plus shady actors from Rajasthan, for which she has evidence.

Although the Congress leader has filed a defamation case against Surendran on 13 March, she finds it curious that the case was filed only after a long delay following her allegation, and only after a crucial file apparently went missing from the state secretariat.

Second, a local branch committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI(M), who opposed the approval for mining, has gone missing for years, and is believed to be dead.

Isn’t it odd, Surendran asks, that a party which is renowned for aiding cadres in distress, has provided no assistance to the missing comrade’s family? Why is a Marxist state government dragging its feet on investigations into a Marxist who went missing for protesting against a mining scam allegedly involving a Congress MP?

Third, she turns on the national heat: how many people are aware that Robert Vadra’s business partner C C Thampi is from Thrissur district? What are Venugopal’s links with Thampi? “He should answer”.

What does all that mean in electoral terms? With factionalism rife in the Congress, Surendran expects a good portion of the anti-Venugopal vote to shift to the BJP.

One statistic is that Surendran has impelled a good rise in her party’s vote share, in both the Lok Sabha elections she has previously contested.

In 2014, in Palakkad, when the BJP was still very much a single-digit party in Kerala, she pushed the vote share up from 9 to 15 per cent (it went up to 21 per cent in the next general election).

In 2019, however, she veritably stormed Attingal constituency, raised the BJP’s vote share up from a meagre 11 per cent to a commendable 25 per cent, transformed the contest into a triangular one, and gave both the other candidates one heck of a scare. In the melee, the Congress won a redoubtable Marxist bastion for the first time since 1989.

Of the 14 per cent which the BJP gained there, 12 per cent came from the Left. This is extremely significant since, gaining votes from the Left is a very difficult task for the BJP in Kerala; it is, in fact, the principal obstacle to the growth of the party here.

In 2024, Surendran’s task is not just to repeat the merry mayhem she triggered in Attingal, but to actually try and win.

Can she do it? With widespread dissatisfaction against the communist government of Vijayan (and by extension to Ariff), a desultory, faction-riven campaign by Venugopal, the Modi effect, and a sizzling performance by the BJP at the grassroots level, anything is possible in Alappuzha.

This is the new BJP at work in Tamil Nadu and Kerala — finally capable of countering the secular narrative, surmounting the shackles of mainstream media, thwarting political intimidation, and successfully delivering the crucial message to every last voter, that development is achievable in their areas if they vote right; and this is what has piqued the curiosity of the rest of India like never before.

As someone from a humble background, who lost her father when she was still in school, was groomed by the Sangh from the age of 13, rose through the party’s ranks by sheer dint of merit, to emerge as a tireless politician, with the image of an aggressive anti-corruption crusader, and one who speaks of development in a language which voters can relate easily to, the last word must, therefore, belong to Shobha Surendran: “I am winning”.

This report is part of Swarajya's 50 Ground Stories Project - an attempt to throw light on themes and topics that are often overlooked or looked down. You can support this initiative by sponsoring as little as ₹2999. Click here for more details.