Thiruvananthapuram: The Bharatiya Janata Party has already commenced preparations for the next general election due in the summer of 2024.
The party has an uphill task in Kerala. It is confidently charting ways to stump its much stronger rivals in the southern state. The saffron outfit has reportedly zeroed in on the Lok Sabha seats for bigwigs like Union Minister V Muraleedharan and actor Suresh Gopi.
Most of the participants at a recent meeting of the top office-bearers of the BJP in the state felt that Muraleedharan should contest from Attingal in the upcoming Lok Sabha election.
However, Sobha Surendran, another senior party leader from Kerala, has also reportedly staked a claim for this constituency.
Even though the majority of state leaders want the seat to be allotted to Muraleedharan, they are also concerned whether offending Sobha would harm the party’s prospects.
The union minister is already making his presence felt in the constituency by regularly attending various functions and the state leadership hopes that these programmes would translate into votes. Muraleedharan has received instructions from the party’s national leadership to focus on Attingal, which is among the five Lok Sabha seats in Kerala which the BJP hopes to win. The national leadership has also directed state leaders to provide suggestions to increase the party’s vote share in these five constituencies.
Even then, some leaders said at the meeting that avoiding Sobha could lead to loss of some votes. Sobha is known as a vote-catcher who can easily attract public attention.
At the same time, a senior party leader claimed that Sobha should not harbour parliamentary ambitions while maintaining a distance from the state leadership. He also said that Sobha’s public criticism of the leadership amounted to indiscipline.
Meanwhile, it is learnt that the BJP’s national leadership would intervene if Sobha continues to demand the Attingal seat.
Earlier, during an interview with a TV channel, Sobha had alleged that a section of the BJP leaders was humiliating her, even though she had sacrificed everything for the party.
“It is for the state leadership to explain my absence from party functions. I am deliberately not being invited to discussions on strengthening BJP in Kerala,” she added.
Sobha had contested from Attingal in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and secured around 2.5 lakh votes, while another BJP candidate had polled a mere 92,000 votes in 2014.
