Pinarayi Vijayan has held on to Dharmadom, but the real story is that he had to fight for it.
Kerala’s two-term Chief Minister has now retained his constituency with 85,614 votes, defeating Congress candidate VP Abdul Rasheed by a margin of 19,247. On paper, it is still a comfortable win. But what unfolded through the morning of Monday, May 4, ensures that this will not be read as a routine victory.
For a constituency that handed him margins of more than 36,000 votes in 2016 and over 50,000 in 2021, Dharmadom has rarely been cause for uncertainty. That is what made the early rounds stand out. Abdul Rasheed led by over 2,800 votes at one point, including in panchayats where the CPI(M) would normally expect to be ahead. In the initial rounds, Vijayan trailed behind Abdul Rasheed giving a scare to the Left front.
The recovery that followed was steady and decisive, which is not unusual in a place where the CPI(M)’s organisation runs deep and tends to show up in later rounds. But the significance lies in the fact that the question even arose. In Dharmadom, the benchmark is not whether Vijayan wins, but whether he is ever seen as vulnerable. This time, for several hours, he was.
It is also worth noting who pushed him there. Rasheed is not a Congress heavyweight. He is a relatively young leader contesting only his second Assembly election. In 2021, he had already drawn attention when he contested from Taliparamba against MV Govindan, reducing what had been a much larger CPI(M) margin. In Dharmadom, he went further, turning that into an early lead before the numbers eventually swung back. The final margin may still be comfortable, but the contest itself was not.
That matters because of the moment this election comes in. The LDF has been in power for a decade. In 2021, it broke Kerala’s long-standing pattern of alternating governments, but that did not mean anti-incumbency disappeared. It meant it was pushed forward. This time, it seems to have shown up all at once. Across Kerala, the Congress-led UDF is poised for a return to power, and by most trends, with a decisive margin rather than a narrow win.
The government’s handling of sensitive issues like Sabarimala seem to have shadowed this election, despite the CPI(M)’s attempts to recalibrate its position to align more closely with devotee sentiment. The Sabarimala gold theft controversy, involving allegations of missing gold and a court-monitored probe into irregularities, gave the Opposition another line of attack.
At the same time, there has been a growing discomfort with how power is exercised. Vijayan’s style of governance, once seen as decisive and efficient, has increasingly been described by critics as centralised and closed off. This election saw small but unusual signs of that, including rare rebellions in Kannur, something the CPI(M) is not used to dealing with in public.
Even the tone of the campaign seemed to reflect that shift. The exchange with Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, which escalated into the now widely discussed “Dash mone Revanthe” remark, drew attention not just because it was sharp, but because it felt out of step with the restraint usually expected from the office. His responses to critics and the media at various points only added to the impression of a leadership that had grown more combative over time.
None of these, on their own, decide an election. But taken together, they help explain why a seat like Dharmadom briefly became competitive.
And Dharmadom is not alone. Across the state, several ministers have faced tighter contests than expected. But for Vijayan, the implications are more layered. This election, like the last, was built around his leadership. The LDF once again leaned on the idea of the “Captain”, the figure who had steered Kerala through crises and could continue to do so. That strategy delivered a historic second term in 2021. But when a campaign is so closely tied to one leader, even a temporary loss of control in a seat like Dharmadom acquires disproportionate significance.
There is also a symbolic resonance to the day. May 4 marks the death anniversary of CPI(M) dissident and RMP leader TP Chandrasekharan, whose killing continues to shape political memory in Kannur. His widow KK Rema — herself an RMP leader who contested from Vadakara and won with a majority of 14,862 votes — responded to the early trends with a Facebook post, saying that the first few rounds were enough for Kerala to make its point. She wrote that, after years, Chandrasekharan would have seen “the man who once called for him to be branded and killed” standing exposed.
In the end, Pinarayi Vijayan retained Dharmadom by a margin of 19,247 votes. But for the first time in years, it is not the size of that margin that stands out. It is the fact that, for a while, it did not look comfortable at all.
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