The Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Kerala, has placed a demand that BJP state President K Surendran should contest from Konni constituency in Pathanamthitta district in the upcoming Kerala Assembly elections. K Padmakumar, the state President of BDJS, told the media that Surendran was able to get a sizeable amount of votes from Pathanamthitta during the Lok Sabha polls and this would help him if he contests from the Konni Assembly constituency which falls under Pathanamthitta.
But many others in the BJP think that this wouldn't be a good idea. Though Surendran had led the BJP’s campaign against women entering Sabarimala in 2018, he lost from Pathanamthitta in 2019 and again in the Konni bye-polls the same year.
The party believes that projecting Surendran as a Sabarimala belief protection 'crusader' did not help since he was an outsider in the constituency.
In the Assembly bye-polls, LDF’s Janeesh Kumar won from Konni where the Sabarimala Lord Ayyappa temple is located, with 54,099 votes. While UDF candidate P Mohanraj came second with 44,146 votes, Surendran could only poll 39,786 votes and came in third. But compared to BJP's performance in 2016 Assembly polls at Konni, Surendran was able to get more than double the number of votes. Their candidate Ashok Kumar managed to get only 16,730 votes in 2016.
Until 2016, Konni was a UDF bastion, where Adoor Prakash was MLA for 23 years. Taking Konni away from the UDF was a historic victory for the LDF.
However, sources from the BJP said that Surendran might contest from Manjeshwar constituency in Kasaragod district.
It was during the 2009 Lok Sabha polls that Surendran, who hails from Kozhikode district, first contested from Kasaragod. He managed to get 1,25,482 votes, which was the best performance by the BJP compared to previous years. In the 2011 Assembly polls, he was a candidate from Manjeshwar constituency where he lost by 5,828 votes. In the 2016 polls, he had lost from this same seat by just 89 votes.