Wayanad

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. Additional information may please be sent as messages to the Facebook community, Indpaedia.com. All information used will be gratefully acknowledged in your name.

Political history

2009-2014

Rajeev KR, It’s Cong’s ‘crown jewel’, but with ever-shrinking margins, April 1, 2019: The Times of India

For Congress’s Kerala unit, Wayanad constituency has been a much-sought-after crown jewel among the 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state for the last decade, ever since it was carved out in the delimitation exercise of 2009.

The constituency, which borders Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, got the tag of ‘safest seat’ of Congress in Kerala after it gave a record margin of 1.53 lakh votes for Congress leader late M I Shanavas in the first election in 2009. Shanavas, who represented the constituency till his death in November 2018, had, however, seen his victory margin dwindle sharply to 20,870 in 2014.

However, the contours of the electoral scene of the traditional UDF bastion has been transformed as never before with the high-profile entry of Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the candidate this time. With the election set to revolve around the pivot of Rahul’s candidature, it will be an uphill task for LDF candidate P P Suneer of CPI to mount a challenge.

NDA, which had earlier announced VV Paily of ally Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), is set to withdraw him and field a more ‘formidable’ candidate. But LDF, which had secured only around 80,000 votes in the 2014 election, does not have the political base in the constituency to give a tough fight.

Also, the pro-poor and pro-farmer plank vigorously pushed by Rahul is expected to find favour in the constituency, which has the highest tribal population in the state (18.5% of Wayanad district’s total population) and especially since 80% of the people, including plantation workers, depend on agriculture for livelihood.