If Christians increasingly believe that the Congress is either unwilling or unable to contain the growing influence of the Indian Union Muslim League within the UDF, or to prevent the Left from retaining power, strategic voting becomes a rational option.
Politics, after all, is not about affection—it is about insurance.
Small but telling shifts are already visible. The BJP won a Lok Sabha seat in Kerala in 2024. More symbolically, it captured the mayor’s post in Thiruvananthapuram—a Marxist bastion for four decades. These are not accidents. They indicate a slow but undeniable movement in the public mind.
Vote-share data reinforces this trend. The BJP polled around 11 per cent in Kerala in 2011. That rose to 16 per cent in 2016. By 2024, it had crossed 20 per cent.
This is not a spike; it is a trajectory.
The lesson from Assam is instructive: when perception consolidates, demography retreats. Muslims in Assam did not disappear between 2011 and 2016. What disappeared was the opposition’s ability to convince voters that it alone could manage the future.
Kerala’s 2026 verdict will emerge from the same womb of time and public perception. Statistics will decorate the debate. But perception will decide the outcome.
From Assam to Tripura and now Kerala, electoral statistics often fail where perception politics quietly rewrites outcomes
In the ultimate analysis of Indian elections, statistics often matter less than something far more elusive and powerful: public perception. Demography, vote-share arithmetic, and census tables make for persuasive presentations—but elections are not won on spreadsheets. They are won in the collective mind of the voter. And once that mind tilts decisively, the victory cup is already halfway raised.
This is where Kerala enters the national political conversation ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections.
At first glance, the idea of the BJP producing a chief minister in Kerala sounds fictional—even to sympathetic observers of the Hindutva ecosystem.
Yet Amit Shah’s recent assertion in the state—that Kerala’s next CM would be from the BJP—forces a pause. Not because the claim seems immediately credible, but because Indian electoral history has repeatedly shown that what looks impossible on paper can become inevitable in practice.
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| Blogger in Dibrugarh : Assam |
Assam offers the most instructive parallel.
In 2011, Assam’s Muslim population stood at over 33 per cent. The Congress dominated, while the BJP managed just 16.1 per cent vote share and 27 seats. Demography appeared destiny. Five years later, in 2016, that assumption collapsed spectacularly.
The BJP’s vote share surged to nearly 42 per cent, the seat tally jumped to 86, and the Congress was dethroned after a decade and a half. Muslim population numbers had increased—not decreased. Yet perception defeated demography.
The same pattern unfolded elsewhere. Tripura, a Left fortress for decades, fell to the BJP in 2018 despite the party having no MLA prior to the election. Uttar Pradesh in the early 1990s defied Mandal-era arithmetic. Electoral engineering worked not because numbers changed overnight, but because narratives did.
Kerala today sits at a similar psychological crossroads.
In 2021, the state broke its own political rhythm.
The Left Democratic Front retained power—an “unthinkable” outcome in a state accustomed to five-year alternation. That alone has generated a visible anti-incumbency mood. Conventional wisdom suggests the Congress should benefit automatically in 2026. Perhaps it will. But elections are rarely that linear.
The deeper question is whether Congress still represents a credible bulwark against forces that key communities perceive as threatening.
In Kerala’s political chessboard, Christians remain the swing constituency. Historically, they have shared little ideological comfort with the BJP or the RSS. Yet Christian voting behaviour elsewhere—Goa, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya—has already broken that stereotype.
The BJP understands this evolution, which explains its sustained outreach to Christian groups in Kerala, initiated at the highest level by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
For sections of Kerala’s Christian community, especially Catholics from specific denominations, the central concern is no longer abstract secularism. It is security, cultural anxiety, and political leverage.
The “Love Jihad” narrative—often dismissed as manufactured—ironically originated in Kerala, with its earliest amplifiers being Christian institutions and media houses. That history matters.
Courtesy -- 'The Raisina Hills'
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