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UDF vs LDF: In Kerala it's the same old story

With the President issuing the poll notification for the September 11 polls in Kerala, the electoral process for the 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state has been set into motion.

Nominations will be accepted till August 19 and scrutiny will take place on August 20. The last date for withdrawal of nominations will be August 23. Campaigning will end on September 9, while counting will take place on October 6.

As always, the fight in Kerala will be between the two political giants -- the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the ruling Marxist-led Left Democratic Front.

There is no major change in the political combinations and permutations that existed in the 1998 February Lok Sabha elections, except for a split in the Revolutionary Socialist Party.

The Congress-led front will continue to have the Indian Union Muslim League, the Kerala Congress-Mani, the Kerala Congress-Jacob, the Kerala Congress-Pillai, the Communist Marxist Party and the Janadhipatya Samrakshana Samiti in its fold.

The CPI-M-led LDF will have in its fold the CPI, the Janata Dal-Secular, the RSP, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Kerala Congress-Joseph.

However, the continuance of the RSP in the front will be confirmed only after the August 15 meeting of the LDF state committee. The RSP has threatened to field its own candidate if the LDF refuses to give it the Kollam seat, which it contested and won in the last election.

The NCP (with which the Congress-S merged recently) has issued a similar threat with regard to the Kannur seat of the Congress (S).

The third political force to reckon with in Kerala is the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP. The BJP has not won a single seat in any of the previous elections, both assembly and Lok Sabha.

The NDA is contesting all the 20 seats in Kerala. But its disadvantage is that none of the member-parties in the National Democratic Alliance have any strength in Kerala.

The NDA in Kerala has nine parties. But only six, the BJP (12 seats), the Lok Shakti, the Janata Dal (united) and the Socialist Republican Party (two seats each), the National Democratic Party (one seat) and the Bharatiya Labour Party (one seat) are contesting.

As far as the base of the political parties in Kerala is concerned, it is evenly distributed between the LDF and the UDF. After coalition politics came to stay in Kerala, the LDF and the UDF have performed well in rotation in both assembly and Lok Sabha elections.

Irrespective of whichever front won more seats, the difference in the vote percentage of the victor and the vanquished has been very narrow.

Among the prominent candidates who would be in the fray this time around are veteran Congress leader K Karunakaran, E M Sreedharan, son the late Marxist ideologue E M S Namboodiripad, former Union minister and Janata Dal-Secular leader, C M Ibrahim, Karunakaran's son K Muralidharan and the BJP deputy leader of the Rajya Sabha, O Rajagopal.

In the 1998 elections, the UDF which secured 11 (Congress-8, IUML-2, Kerala Congress [Mani]-1 ) of the 20 lok Sabha Seats, got 45.94 per cent of the total valid votes polled.

This was just 1.2 per cent more than the vote share of the LDF which won the remaining nine seats (CPM-6, CPI-2 and RSP-1) and polled 44.75 per cent of the valid votes.

This time, the split in the state unit of the RSP is likely to affect the prospects of the LDF in the Kollam Lok Sabha seat, which has remained a Left bastion.

Kerala is not going in for simultaneous assembly and Lok Sabha polls, as the present Marxist-led Nayanar government has two more years to go before its five-year term ends.

As many as 8,73,582 new voters in Kerala will cast their maiden ballot in the coming general elections.

According to revised electoral rolls, the total number of voters has increased to 22,026,480, with the addition of 800,000 plus new voters.

More than 125,000 polling officers would be deputed for election duty in the 20 Lok Sabha constituencies of the state during the elections, official sources said.

Electronic voting machines would be used in 2,500 polling booths in two constituencies -- Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam. The Electronics Corporation of India has started repairing as many as 4,500 machines for this purpose.

UNI

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