New Delhi : Kerala, which was recently rechristened as Keralam, will vote in a single phase on April 9. The votes for the 140-member assembly will be counted on May 4.
The majority mark stands at 70. The assembly's term ends on May 23.
There are 2.70 crore electors in the state - 1.31 crore males, 1.38 crore women and 277 from the third gender.
The Keralam poll results will be crucial not just for the 80-year-old Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front but for the entire Left movement in India, because it's the only state in the country where the Left is in power now. The Left lost Bengal and Tripura a few years ago.
Kerala, known for its seesaw politics, has been alternating between the LDF and the Congress-led United Democratic Front, but the BJP has been emerging as a major challenger, its vote percentage has gone from about 5 per cent to nearly 20 per cent in the 2024 election.
The seesaw trend of the state was broken in 2021, when the electorate returned the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government for a second consecutive term.
The BJP had opened its account in the Kerala Assembly for the first time in 2016 when it won the Nemom constituency. However, CPI(M)'s V Sivankutty recaptured the seat for the LDF in the 2021 Assembly elections.
In the present Assembly, the Congress has 22 legislators, with one who has been expelled from the party.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when votes were counted in Keralam, the LDF managed to secure just one of the 20 seats in the state. This was followed by a series of by-elections in which, barring one constituency, the rest were won convincingly by the UDF.
The results, however, saw the Congress-led UDF register what party leaders described as one of its best performances in the history of local body polls in Kerala.
The missing gold plates from the idols at Kerala's most popular shrine, Sabarimala, have emerged as a big headache for the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government. The opposition has seized the opportunity to allege wrongdoing by the temple administration.
