The Left Democratic Front in Kerala secured only one seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, just like it did in 2019. K Radhakrishnan of CPI(M), who is also the sitting Devaswom Minister in the state, won from the Alathur constituency with 4,03,447 votes, securing a margin of 20,111 votes. United Democratic Front’s Ramya Haridas came in second with 383, 336 votes. Alathur, a Scheduled Caste reserved parliamentary constituency and a CPI(M) stronghold, was won by Ramya in 2019 with a sweeping majority. This time around, Ramya was the lone woman candidate of UDF in Kerala.
Ramya was the second-ever Dalit woman Member of Parliament (MP) from Kerala. Bhargavi Thankappan from CPI was the first Dalit woman MP from Kerala, having won from the Adoor seat in 1971.
In 2019, while Ramya won 5,33,815 votes, LDF’s PK Biju managed to get 3,74,847 votes. She won by a margin of 1,58,968 votes. In the two Lok Sabha elections held in the constituency after its formation post delimitation in 2008, the people of Alathur have stood with the Left. Ramya, who had been a Block Panchayat President then, was not the name many expected as the UDF candidate, but she made a breakthrough.
Now, K Radhakrishnan has won back the Alathur constituency, which is incidentally the only constituency where the LDF has won in Kerala. In 2019 too, the LDF had just one seat, which was Alappuzha. Though the LDF had expected to win two seats until the very last moment, the front lost in Attingal after a neck to neck fight.
In Attingal, V Joy of the CPI(M) had given a close contest to his Congress rival and incumbent MP Adoor Prakash, losing the seat by 684 votes. V Muraleedharan, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidate and former minister of state in the Union government, came in third. Both the LDF and the UDF have held the Attingal constituency alternatingly over the decades. The victorious candidate Adoor Prakash had won it from A Sampath of the CPI(M) in 2019.
This time, the LDF has lost Alappuzha, the only seat it won in 2019. AM Ariff of the CPI(M) who had won the constituency with a margin of over 10,000 votes, lost to Congress’ KC Venugopal this time by over 62,000 votes.
In a press release by CPI(M) state secretariat reacting to the election results, the party said, “LDF got only one seat in the state in the last Lok Sabha elections as well. There have been situations in the past where the party did not get a single seat in the state. At all such stages, the party has adopted the style of conducting proper checks and making necessary corrections.”
The statement also added, “The LDF was able to win big in the subsequent Local Self-Government Elections as a part of the corrective actions taken after examining the reasons for the failure in the last Lok Sabha Elections. In the assembly elections held after that, it was the first time in the electoral history of Kerala that the LDF continued rule.”