Kasaragod

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

Political leanings

1957-2014: mainly communist

Sudhakaran P, Cong looks to breach Red fort with Kannadiga pride, March 28, 2019: The Times of India

With 12 victories in 15 Lok Sabha elections (two of which came during the time of the undivided communist party), CPM’s political graph in Kasaragod constituency is almost steady, a ‘red fort’ without a crack.

The communist history of Kasaragod began with AK Gopalan (AKG), who won from here thrice in a row from 1957. Though the first electoral victory of AKG was in a tie-up with the Kisan Masdoor Praja Party and then the Socialist front, the party was successful in winning the people’s confidence at the grassroots over a period of time, according to political analyst KP Mohanan.

But one should not forget the shock CPM received in 1971. When young Congress leader Ramachandran Kadannappally, now a minister in LDF government, was fielded by UDF, against veteran communist EK Nayanar, nobody expected him to create history. Then 26 years old, he defeated Nayanar by 28,404 votes. In 1977 too, he repeated the victory. Though CPM recaptured Kasaragod in 1980, it lost it again in 1984.

However, since 1989, there has been no looking back. But what worries the party is the dwindling majority. Current MP P Karunakaran, who had won by 1,08,256 votes in 2004, had to be content with 64,427 votes in 2009, which fell to an alarming 6,921 in 2014.

It’s this parallel graph that gives Congress confidence this time. It wants to use the potential of 3.5 lakh Kannadiga voters in Kasaragod, who have linguistic pride.

Sentiments among locals, following the murder of two Youth Congress activists, is a concern for CPM. Still, party candidate KP Satheesh Chandran is confident because of his image and the well-oiled party machinery.

Though Kasaragod has a pluralistic culture, there is a communal divide between Hindus and Muslims, which is often exploited by mainstream political parties, in which CPM was more successful.