Starting today, Onmanorama will track the contest in 12 closely-fought constituencies. Stakes are high, margins are thin in these hot seats. We begin with Nemom, Manjeshwar, Palakkad and Kunnathunad. Onmanorama team will capture the ground-level pulse and update the poll-meter.

With less than a month left for the Assembly elections, BJP's Rajeev Chandrasekhar seems to be ahead in Nemom during the initial stages of the contest. CPM's V Sivankutty, whose posters were the first to appear in the constituency, is a close second. 

The Congress, whose organisational apparatus in the constituency has crumbled to virtual non-existence, is nowhere in the picture. Former MLA and Thiruvananthapuram councillor K Sabarinadhan was confirmed as Congress candidate relatively late, three days after the election dates were announced.

A weak Congress is one of the reasons why the BJP has a headstart in Nemom. Any anti-incumbency sentiment in Nemom will, therefore, manifest as a vote for the BJP. The sizeable Muslim voters in Nemom (unofficial estimates say it is between 20-22%) will overwhelmingly prefer Sivankutty, considering that he has a higher chance of winning than the Congress candidate.
Yet another reason why Rajeev Chandrasekhar leads the race at this stage is the BJP's performances in the Nemom segment during the 2025 local body polls and also during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. It won 15 of the 23 wards in the Nemom segment in the local body polls; it had won 13 wards in the 2020 local body polls. 

And in the 2024 and 2014 Lok Sabha polls when Congress's Shashi Tharoor secured a lead of nearly one lakh votes, Nemom was the only segment where the BJP candidates had an upper hand.
A third reason would be the RSS-led house-level campaign that had begun at least a month ago in the constituency. 

The wind is behind Rajeev Chandrasekhar but what keeps the contest close is Sivankutty's image. 
Some of his interventions as general education minister -- on one side, issuing a stern direction to a school in Kochi to let a Muslim girl attend classes wearing the 'hijab' and on the other, warning Muslim clerics against interfering in school timings -- has rebranded him as a strong secular leader. 

The 'rowdy' image that had stuck on him after running amok inside the Assembly on Budget day in 2013 has been effectively masked by the 'grandfatherly' vibe he has projected as the minister of schoolchildren.
Up against Sivankutty's 'man of the house' familiarity will be Rajeev Chandrasekhar's aspirational refinement. 

Congress's fatal lapse
Right from 2011, when it first shot up to the second position, the BJP had grown at the expense of the Congress and the UDF.

A vote share of over 50 per cent in 2006, when Congress's N Sakthan was the candidate, plummeted to 17.38 per cent in 2011 when the Congress left the seat to its minor ally Socialist Janata (Democratic) Party. 

Then, the Congress failed to sense the Hindu resurgence that had already begun. There were no evident signs of this political awakening but it could have been spotted in the most unremarkable events like family gatherings. 

The Congress did not find anything politically consequential in the growing popularity of Bhagavad Gita classes organised by Ramakrishna Mission and Rama Dasa Mission in areas like Nedumcaud, Kalady, Melamcode, Ambalathara and Kamaleshwaram, all of which eventually became part of the Nemom constituency. 

Pre-Modi Hindu wave
These Gita classes were creating, accumulating and sustaining an ardent Hindu group that the BJP would later find easy to own, even without an inspirational figure like Narendra Modi. At that point, Modi was just another Chief Minister of a state and diminished by the taint of Godhra riots.

Apart from Manjeshwar in Kasaragod district, Nemom is the only constituency in Kerala that saw the BJP emerge second even before the Modi wave swept the country.

If the Congress failed to notice, it was because the party was deceived, lulled into complacency, by the performance of the BJP in the 2010 local body polls; it had won just one ward (M R Gopan from Ponnumangalam, which incidentally falls within the Nemom segment).  

So when BJP's O Rajagopal gave CPM's V Sivankutty a real scare and pushed the UDF into near oblivion in 2011, it was a shocker. From just 5 per cent, the BJP vote share rocketed to nearly 38 per cent, and he was just 6415 votes away from Sivankutty. The UDF was crippled.

Five years later, in 2016, the picture was flipped: Rajagopal trounced Sivankutty by 8671 votes. He secured 47.46 per cent of the votes. And the UDF was obliterated. Its share dipped to below 10 per cent. The CPM, even in loss, held on to its traditional 41-42 per cent votes. 

Strong loser
Finally, it took a Congress crowd-puller like K Muraleedharan in 2021 to not only arrest the UDF slide but also improve the UDF vote share to a respectable 25 per cent. A substantial chunk of the votes Muraleedharan retrieved for the Congress came from the BJP, and the CPM's Sivankutty had a reasonably comfortable win in 2021 even with a depleted vote share (38.24%).

So, if the BJP has to be knocked out of the lead, Sabarinadhan has to ensure core Congress party votes plus at least a part of the neutral anti-incumbency votes. In short, he should persuade at least 20-25 per cent of the voters in Nemom to opt for the certain loser.