Meet the underdog who dented Pinarayi Vijayan's swagger in Dharmadam

Kannur: “The six rounds that are over, that’s enough, Kerala! After 14 years, Chandrasekharan has finally seen the man who branded him a traitor and called for his killing, standing stripped and exposed under the scorching sun.”

That was the Facebook post of Vadakara MLA-elect and RMPI leader K K Rema at 11.46 am on May 4, as vote counting in Dharmadam was underway. It carried grief, political irony and the unmistakable sting of history.

Rema’s husband, T P Chandrasekharan, was hacked to death, allegedly by CPM workers on May 4, 2012, after he walked out of the party and founded the Revolutionary Marxist Party of India (RMPI) at Onchiyam in Vadakara.

Rema posted those words as the improbable was unfolding in Dharmadam.

For six straight rounds of counting, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, whom Rema accused of having masterminded murder of her husband, was trailing in his own constituency to a 36-year-old Congress challenger whom much of Kerala barely knew five years ago.

That challenger was V P Abdul Rasheed.

Right from Round 1, round after round, Rasheed maintained a strong lead, keeping the Chief Minister in the red:

• Round 1: Rasheed +733
• Round 2: Rasheed +2,523
• Round 3: Rasheed +2,077
• Round 4: Rasheed +2,812
• Round 5: Rasheed +1,090

Only in Round 7, after votes from Peralassery began coming in, did Vijayan move into the green for the first time, by just 1,536 votes.

For a man whose smiling face had towered over Kerala’s highways, asking voters ‘who else but the LDF’, the scene in Dharmadam was nothing short of political humiliation.

Dharmadam may have returned him to the Assembly, but not before his reputation was sullied, his swagger clipped. By the end, Vijayan survived by only 19,247 votes.

In 2021, he had crushed his Congress rival by 50,123 votes, polling 59.61% of the vote. This time, his vote share plunged nearly 10 percentage points, to under 50%.

For a Chief Minister contesting from his own political backyard in Kannur, that was a message not from the opposition but from his own party cadre because he was trailing in Chembilode, Ancharakandy and Vengad panchayats, all strongholds of the CPM. Since its inception, Chembilode has always been ruled by the CPM. His house stands in Vengad’s ward no. 14, Kelaloor. “He could not convince even his neighbours to vote for him,” said Rasheed, known for his cheeky oratory.

 The man who made Pinarayi sweat
Campaigning in Marxist strongholds in Dharmadam, he often delivered a line that stuck: “If you don’t know who Abdul Rasheed is, ask the people of Taliparamba.”

In 2021, when the Left wave swept Kannur, he was the Congress candidate in Taliparamba against M V Govindan. That year, while CPM candidates elsewhere in the district cruised to record margins, Rasheed nearly halved Govindan’s winning margin to 22,689 votes, down from 40,617 in 2016.

For years, the Congress’s vote was hovering around the 50,000 mark in Taliparamba. He increased it to 70,000 in 2021. (This year, CPM went on to lose Taliparamba for the first time in 49 years, and UDF-backed CPM rebel T K Govindan got 91,339 votes).

Rasheed proved that what he did in Taliparamba was no fluke, and that it could be repeated in Dharmadam. But he said the Congress leaders did not share his conviction and left him to run the campaign on his own with the workers. After the election, Rasheed said he had approached senior leaders, including Shafi Parambil, to campaign for him in Dharmadam. But none of those who kept criticising the chief minister for the past 10 years came to Dharmadam to campaign for him.

Rasheed said he knew Dharmadam like the back of his hand. For the past five years, he had been living in Peralassery, at his wife’s home in the constituency. Even before that, he had spent seven years as a student in Dharmadam, pursuing his law degree and master's at the Kannur University campus there.

During his campaign, he turned the election into a referendum on Pinarayi Vijayan as an MLA and attacked him as an inaccessible legislator. “I told the people only two things,” Rasheed said.

“I will never say kadakku purathu (‘get out’). And if someone asks me a question, I won’t tell them to go home and ask.”

It was a direct attack on Vijayan’s public image, distant, combative, and increasingly insulated.

Rasheed also punched holes in the development narrative.

He asked why roads in the Chief Minister’s constituency remained narrow. Why were public health facilities still incomplete? Why were government buildings inaugurated but left unusable? Why did even the Chief Minister’s alma mater, Government Brennen College, lack a proper canteen? And why, as even local CPI(M) workers privately complained, could they not get access to their own MLA?

The Chief Minister started feeling the heat and changed his campaign schedule midway. He started conducting 12 events in one panchayat every day. His wife was out in the sun seeking votes. In 2021, Vijayan would conduct only one event for three to four panchayats. He could afford to do that because all eight panchayats were always controlled by the CPM.

But one man changed it. At least for six rounds. “In Chembilode, Anjarakandy, and Vengad, where the Chief Minister should have opened with a 20,000 lead, he was trailing. That is enough,” he said.

Rasheed said he started trailing in panchayats where he was not given access to campaign, where his billboards were stolen, workers were attacked, and booth agents were chased away from polling stations. “Those stations saw more than 90% polling, which could be bogus voting,” he said.

But the UDF has won the perception battle in Dharmadam, he said. The image of Pinarayi being a man of development was punctured.