- Wednesday, March 12, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which recently tasted yet another electoral success after its presidential nominee Droupadi Murmu bagged a landslide win to become the country’s first tribal head of state, was not too displeased by the fact that the president-elect received a solitary vote from the southern state of Kerala, which is ruled by the Left.
On Thursday (21), Murmu defeated opposition candidate Yashwant Sinha by a big margin to become the 15th president of the republic.
The BJP has little presence in Kerala where the Left and the Indian National Congress still happen to be major political players and the fact that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) presidential nominee received one vote in the state has kicked up a debate there.
The BJP has no state legislator in Kerala and neither it has any parliamentarian from there. It was thus elated that Murmu received at least one vote from the state and valued it more than the other 139 ballots that went to Sinha. Neither Kerala’s ruling Left nor opposition Congress wanted to put the blame on anybody without knowing the facts, the Press Trust of India reported.
The BJP felt that it was its hard work in reaching out to legislators from other parties that resulted in Murmu getting the single vote. Several instances of cross-voting were reported during the presidential election which, according to experts, exposed the opposition’s lack of unity against the NDA.
BJP’s Kerala chief K Surendran shared on Facebook the purported break-up chart of the total votes polled to Murmu and Sinha from the states and the parliament and it indicated that one state lawmaker from Kerala voted for the saffron camp-backed candidate.
However, one BJP legislator from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh named Neel Ratan Singh Patel cast his ballot for the presidential election from Kerala where he was receiving Ayurvedic treatment at a hospital in the state’s Palakkad district.
It was still not clear as to who cast the single vote for Murmu in Kerala but the state BJP was elated saying it was a “positive” development.
Addressing a press meet on Friday (22), Surendran said the vote polled to the NDA candidate from the state was not an “accidental” one as believed by many.
He said he had sent a letter to all the 140 MLAs in the state and MPs from the state requesting them to cast their vote for Murmu.
Many of them were met personally with the request and there were several legislators and parliamentarians from the state who secretly admitted they would like to vote for the NDA candidate, he claimed.
“They told us in person that they could not violate the party line and vote for the NDA candidate but their conscience is with her. We had strong expectations about two votes but we did not get one of them in the last moment. We don’t know whether it was so because of any pressure from the respective party leadership,” Surendran said.
When reporters asked the details about the person who voted in favour of the NDA nominee, the BJP leader laughed it off, asking the media to find it out.
Responding to the matter, senior Congress leader V D Satheesan said no one actually knows what had happened in the presidential election.
“It is not right to insult anyone without knowing the things properly,” the Leader of Opposition told reporters in Kozhikode.
When the media asked whether the ruling CPI(M) would look into any suspected incident of cross voting and probe who did it, party state secretary Balakrishnan asked how it could be done.
“If you(media) know a way please let us know,” he told reporters here.
When asked whether the party doubts any particular MLA, the Left leader said it was not right to blame anyone without any proof.
“Normally you people (reporters) guess and write about such matters. But in this case, I couldn’t find any such articles. CPI (M) MLAs will not do this,” he added.
[With PTI inputs]
