Kerala Assembly polls 2026: Defections from Congress to BJP continue

Defections from the Congress party to the BJP continued on Friday, with two Youth Congress leaders joining the BJP.

BJP State president, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, welcomed B.S. Anoop, former Thiruvananthapuram district president of Dalit Congress, into the party. Anoop had contested the 2021 Assembly elections from the Chirayinkeezhu constituency on a UDF ticket and is likely to be fielded by the BJP from the same seat in the upcoming election.

Another Youth Congress leader, R.S. Arunraj, a former executive committee member of the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, also joined the BJP on Friday.

At a press conference addressed by Mr. Chandrasekhar here on Friday, both Mr. Anoop and Mr. Arunraj expressed their anger and anguish at being “disregarded” by the Congress party despite the long years they had put in as faithful party workers. Mr. Anoop said that despite his links with people of Chirayinkeezhu, he was never made part of any discussions to decide the candidate there.

Mr. Anoop particularly expressed his discontent over the Congress’s decision to field Ramya Haridas from Chirayinkeezhu and alleged that the party no longer stood for the downtrodden and vulnerable sections of society.

The two leaders further criticised the Congress for “laying out the red carpet” for CPI(M) leaders from Kannur, including T.K. Govindan and V. Kunhikrishnan, whom they accused of being part of the violent political culture associated with the CPI(M) in Kannur.

Mr. Chandrasekhar pointed out that in the last one month alone several senior members of both Congress and the CPI(M) had joined BJP and that the CPI(M) had been showing much intolerance towards them. Three former MLAs of the Left parties — C.C Mukundan (Nattika), K. Ajith (Vaikom) and S. Rajendran (Devikulam) were now contesting the 2026 elections on BJP tickets in the same constituencies, Mr. Chandrasekhar added.

He said that people were becoming increasingly fed up with both political fronts in Kerala and that NDA’s results in the upcoming elections would be nothing short of phenomenal. Mr. Chandrasekhar claimed that the NDA would pull off an unexpected win in one of the Assembly seats and added cryptically that everything would become clear on May 4.