With the deadline for withdrawal of nomination papers for the Lok Sabha elections ending Monday, a familiar picture has emerged in the constituency of Kannur in north Kerala. A handful of namesakes have survived the cut and will be in the contest for the election on April 26.
The two favourites, sitting MP K Sudhakaran of the Congress and M V Jayarajan of the CPM, have a pair of namesakes.
When the issue of namesakes cropped up, the electoral officer offered a solution: Add the father's name. The Congress leader will feature third among the list of 12 candidates and his name will be shown as K Sudhakaran s/o Ravunni V. His two 'independent' namesakes, also K Sudhakaran, will feature 11th and 12th in the list and their names will have suffixed s/o Krishnan and s/o P Gopalan respectively.
The solution for CPM leader M V Jayarajan's namesake dilemma is prefixing 'Adv' before his name which features first in the list. His namesakes Jayaraj E P and Jayarajan M V s/o Velayudhan will feature fifth and sixth in the list respectively.
When namesakes were not merely namesakes
K Sudhakaran, who is the chief of the Congress party in Kerala, has had his share of trouble with namesakes in the past. Sudhakaran went into the 2014 General Elections as the sitting MP and faced CPM's P K Sreemathi. He had two namesakes then, K Sudhakaran Kollon House and K Sudhakaran Sreesailam, who together managed 6,985 votes. Sudhakaran lost the election by a margin of 6,566 votes. Incidentally, Sreemathi too had a namesake, Sreemathi Puthalath, who got 1,500 votes.
In 2019, Sudhakaran recaptured the constituency with a heavy margin of 94,559 votes, but even then he had to battle three namesakes -- K Sudhakaran s/o Kunhiraman, K Sudhakaran s/o Krishnan and Sudhakaran P K s/o Krishnanpilla. The trio secured 4,037 votes. Sreemathi, who came second, had two namesakes this time: P Sreemathi w/o Raveendran and K Sreemathi w/o Sudeep Kumar, who bagged 1,377 votes (total).
