Pramod Narayan of Kerala Congress (Mani) will manage to retain the Ranni seat, which the CPM had held since 1996, according to the Manorama News-VMR Kerala Exit Poll results telecast on Friday.
The exit poll results hinted that Narayan might overcome the outsider tag hurled against him, the disappointment within the CPM cadres of having to cede Ranni to a new ally, and emerge the winner with 37.3 per cent votes. The UDF candidate, Congress Rinku Cherian is runner up with 34.4 per cent votes. Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS) candidate K Padmakumar is third with 19.8 per cent votes. Last time Padmakumar had secured 21.06 per cent votes, eating massively into the Congress votes. The Sabarimala hill shrine falls within Ranni.
Narayan's predicted win should be seen as a triumph of LDF's cohesion. Initially, there were suppressed grunts of disapproval within the local CPM cadres when it was announced that the KC(M) would be given the seat. This was a seat that the CPM had wrested from the Congress in 1996, using a young 35-year-old area secretary named Raju Abraham. Ever since, in the four subsequent general elections, Raju had never tasted defeat.
On top of Raju's absence from the fray was the perception that Narayan was an outsider. Rinku Cherian, son of former legislator M C Cherian and a KPCC secretary, is a popular local leader, and the UDF had used the son-of-the-soil plank to maximum effect. The UDF was also buoyed by the fact that during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Pathanamthitta's UDF candidate Anto Antony had a lead of 7824 votes in the Ranni segment.
