Why Does The BJP Struggle In Keralam Despite A Rising Vote Share?

Last Updated:April 01, 2026, 18:01 IST

Kerala heads to polls in April 2026, BJP vote share and local wins are rising, but demographic limits, strong Left history and coalition politics keep it seatless

Keralam votes on April 9, 2026, and Suresh Gopi’s Thrissur Lok Sabha victory in 2024 has given the BJP something it has wanted for decades: proof of concept. The NDA’s vote share climbed from roughly 6 percent in the 1990s to 19.24 percent in the 2024 general election; and the party won its first ever Municipal Corporation in Thiruvananthapuram in 2025. Yet heading into the 2026 assembly elections, it holds zero seats in a 140-member house.

The Land That Was Earned By The Left Front

Keralam’s left politics did not arrive with pamphlets. It arrived with ploughs. From the 1920s and 1930s, peasant and labour movements in Malabar, Cochin and Travancore fused anti-colonial anger with demands for land and dignity. When the Communist Party of India won the 1957 state elections, forming what was then only the second democratically elected communist government in world history, it immediately moved on agrarian reform. Tenants who had worked land for generations got ownership of it. That is not a policy people forget. The CPI(M) did not just build a vote bank. It built an identity. In Kannur alone, researchers from the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society documented roughly 50 “party villages" where the Party organises not just elections but daily life itself.

The Mathematics Of Voting

Hindus make up 55 percent of Keralam’s population. Muslims account for 27 percent, and Christians 18 percent. Together, the two minority communities are nearly half the electorate. “Though the BJP’s vote share has been increasing steadily, it cannot win even a single parliament seat because of demography," K.M. Sajad Ibrahim, professor of political science at Kerala University, told Al Jazeera. In 2019, just 2 percent of religious minorities voted for the party. Even among Hindus, the vote split three ways between the UDF, the LDF, and the BJP. A state where 45 percent of voters see the BJP’s ideological project as a direct threat to their existence is not a state with a conversion problem. It is a state with a ceiling problem.

The Paradoxical Nature Of The Seat Distribution

In the 2021 assembly elections, the NDA took 12.41 percent of votes and won zero seats. In the 2016 assembly race, O. Rajagopal won Nemom by 8,671 votes in a two-way contest, whereas, in 2021, in the same seat, the BJP’s Kummanam Rajasekharan lost to the CPI(M) by 3,949 votes with Congress splitting the field. That is the BJP’s structural problem in a single constituency – it gets real enough votes, but they spread thin across a three-cornered field where the Left’s disciplined vote transfers and the Congress minority base holds. As Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, and a stalwart of the Keralam Congress told The Deccan Chronicle, winning a seat in Keralam requires at least 35 percent of the vote in that constituency. There are barely two or three seats where the BJP is within range of that number.

The Challenges The BJP Faces For 2026

Suresh Gopi’s 74,686-vote Thrissur margin in 2024 showed what happens when the BJP fields a candidate with personal cross-community appeal in a constituency where it had already built years of booth infrastructure. In 2024, the BJP led in 11 assembly segments across the state. In 2026, assembly elections run on different math: smaller constituencies, fewer protest votes, and the full weight of LDF and UDF tactical coordination reasserting itself. C.P. John, leader of the Communist Marxist Party, put it directly to Al Jazeera: the BJP’s failure to form meaningful alliances in Keralam has made it a winless unit in a state where even minor parties have always bartered for influence through coalition. A rising vote share means the BJP is becoming harder to ignore, but does not mean that the BJP is anywhere close to winning.

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