Thiruvananthapuram win an early test of BJP’s urban strategy in Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram has spent decades behaving like Kerala’s political handwriting. It has been legible and, even in moments of anger, predictable. That is why the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA’s breakthrough in the state capital’s local body election lands with the force of an unfamiliar signature. 

In the 101-ward Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, the NDA won 50 wards. The CPI(M)-led LDF won 29, and the Congress-led UDF 19. Two wards went to Independents. The NDA finished one seat shy of the 51-mark in a full-strength council. Still, it emerged as the dominant bloc in a city that had been, for 45 years, the Left’s and the Congress’s prestigious municipal address. 

This distinction matters because Kerala’s urban politics is often decided less by sweeping waves than by the geometry of vote splits. A party can be ideologically polarising state-wide and still be electorally efficient at the ward level. This is especially true in a three-cornered contest where the UDF and the LDF continue to cannibalise each other’s margins. In this context, the NDA’s 50 is best read as a map made of many small victories rather than one large conversion. 

This was not a lightning strike, as the same election delivered a strong state-wide showing for the UDF. The Congress-led front secured control of four of Kerala’s six corporations, and the LDF held on to Kozhikode and lost Thiruvananthapuram. It suggests that Kerala’s electorate is not moving in a single direction. It is reallocating power with a kind of tactical mood. The people are rewarding performance and punishing inaction alike. 

Larger footprint

Now, consider the BJP’s longer game. It has rarely been about sudden state-wide dominance in Kerala and more about making the map look different, one local unit at a time. Even in the 2025 local-body results beyond the capital, the NDA’s footprint expanded in measurable ways. One summary of the results notes the NDA winning 1,919 wards state-wide, up from 1,597 in 2020. Another Kerala election analysis points out that the BJP secured 93 wards in corporations across the state this time (including the 50 in Thiruvananthapuram), compared with 59 in 2020. These are not the numbers of a party “about to run Kerala.” They are the numbers of a party that is learning how to stop being ornamental.

Thiruvananthapuram, in that sense, is less a trophy and more a template. It is because capital cities are uniquely replicable political machines. They contain, in compressed form, the problems and aspirations that other corporations also manage. In the immediate aftermath of the result, even local civic and business groups framed “expectations” around stalled projects. All this, they argue, will happen in “alignment” with the Union government. That alignment argument,
fair or not, travels well to other urban centres where citizens want the boring things to work.

The BJP’s challenge, of course, is that Kerala’s cities are not identical organisms. They are different social coalitions with different anxieties. Coastal wards vote with a set of grievances like erosion, seawater intrusion, and a suspicion of “development” that arrives without protection. Inner-city wards are vexed with another set of issues. A party attempting replication must therefore export not a slogan but a method. Identify the dominant local grievance and avoid actions that turn a municipal race into an identity referendum. 

On candidate strategy, the capital offers cues. The BJP did not just rely only on its brand. It also invested in recognisable faces and credibility cues. This was visible in high-profile wards such as Sasthamangalam, where BJP candidate and ex-DGP R Sreelekha won. This is a familiar BJP tactic. In Kerala, it carries an extra utility. It reframes the vote as a choice about competence rather than ideology.

Left’s story

The other half of the story is the Left’s introspection. A defeat of this scale tends to produce two reactions: denial in public and diagnosis in private. You can already see a version of that in the post-result chatter around leadership and complacency. Whether the LDF interprets this loss as a one-off urban setback or as a warning will shape how easy replication becomes for the BJP. 

So what does “replication” look like in practical electoral terms? It looks like targeting corporations where the BJP can plausibly become the largest bloc even without an outright majority. It looks like identifying wards where the UDF-LDF contest is tight enough that a disciplined third player can win with a stable base plus marginal additions. And it looks like persuading voters that the BJP is not merely “a message to the state government” but a workable municipal option.

Thiruvananthapuram is the kind of place where political myths are made and broken easily. The NDA’s 50 wards are not the end of a story. It is the beginning of a strategy that other corporations, watching their own angry drain water after the next monsoon, may find easier to imagine.

(The writer is a journalist-turned-communications professional based in Bengaluru)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.