After almost two months since former Kerala BJP president Kummanam Rajasekharan was appointed as the governor of Mizoram, the state finally gets its head.
Senior leader PS Sreedharan Pillai has been announced as the president of the party state unit.
The party made the official announcement in Delhi on Monday.
Sreedharan Pillai had earlier led the party in the state from 2003 to 2006. Though names of party general secretaries AS Radhakrishnan and K Surendran were doing the rounds, the final choice of BJP Chief Amit Shah was Sreedharan Pillai. Shah had reportedly commissioned a secret survey using a Malayalam television channel, which found that Pillai had the majority support.
Pillai is the face of soft Hindutva or secularism and he is a respectable figure as an author. He has been careful to distance himself from any sensations and has a clean image as a politician in the state.
In the survey, Pillai received 39.5% support, while O Rajagopal, the maiden and the single MLA of the party in the state, received 20% and Surendran received 12%.
The party chose to field him again in Chengannur bye-election held in May, following the demise of the sitting Left Democratic Front MLA Ramachandran Nair.
Pillai, though failed to keep expectations of emerging second, managed to score 35,270 votes. The CPI (M) won the election while the Congress came second.
Sreedharan Pillai’s performance in the 2016 Assembly elections in the same constituency convinced the party to chose him as its candidate in the by-election as well.
In 2016 elections, LDF’s Ramachandran Nair had won 52,880 votes, while UDF candidate Vishnunath came second with 44,897 votes and followed by Pillai with 42,682 votes.
In a surprise move, the party removed the then state president Kummanam Rajasekharan from the state president post, when the campaign for the by-election, held on May 28, was at its peak.