Thiruvananthapuram, April 2(BPNS)
While BJP is projecting several A Plus seats across the state, with several high profile candidates like Kummanam Rajashekharn,“Metro Man”, E Sreedharan, party state president ,K Surendran, Shobha Surendran as the sure seats, silently and certainly former state president of the BJP, PK Krishnadas is emerging as the dark horse.
Krishnadas with his mild mannerisms and down to earth attitude has endeared himself with the party workers ever since his public life after quitting as a lower primary school teacher.
Kattakada is an A plus constituency for the BJP and Krishnadas is a heavy weight candidate but what makes the story different is the candidates approach towards the voters and his no- nonsense attitude towards issues and people. The BJP leader has always refrained from personal attacks against political opponents and has always stuck to the plank of development of the constituency through out his campaigning.
In the 2016 elections CPM leader IB Satheesh won from the constituency with a margin of 849 votes defeating senior Congress leader and former Minister N Shakthan. Krishnadas as the BJP candidate garnered 38,700 votes with 26.94 percent of total vote percentage. This was an increase of 7.72 percent from the 2011 elections when he got 22,550 votes at 19.22 percent.
PK Krishnadas was staying at Kattakada and has always been with the people of the constituency and his campaigning is revolving around the total and comprehensive development of the constituency. The major impetus given is for bringing in almost all support from the Central government which include value added products for farm produce and for trying global markets for the people of the area.
The senior BJP leader’s main forte are two things, Simple villager image and his high contacts at the echelons of power in New Delhi including direct access to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Defense minister Rajnath Singh and other senior leaders. As national secretary of BJP in charge of Telengana he had done a stellar performance and the party won seats from the state with Kishan Reddy becoming Union minister of state for Home.
Leader of BJP from Karnataka and former minister Shobha Karandijale is the Prabhari for the constituency and has been doing all the grass root work including door to door campaigning for Krishnadas.
With the minority communities giving up their reluctance towards the BJP, Krishnadas and his team are expecting a good percentage of votes from the Christian Nadar community who have a sizeable number of votes in Kattakada.
In the recent local body polls, BJP has garnered around 42000 votes in the constituency and this is again a positive sign for Krishnadas. With the Congress having a weak candidate in Malayankeez Venugopal and group war between Congress leaders at the peak, the fight is between IB Satheesh and PK Krsihandas.
With hardly three days remaining for the polls, the BJP leadership is confident that it will be Krishnadas this time.
