It all began a decade-and-a-half ago, in 2009. K Surendran was then the Kerala State President of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the BJP’s youth wing. During the parliamentary election, he was named the saffron party’s Lok Sabha candidate from Kasaragod. He lost the polls to CPM’s P Karunakaran, finishing third. Surendran didn’t give up. He contested more elections — two to Parliament and four to the Kerala Legislature. He, in fact, contested the 2021 election from two constituencies: Konni and Manjeshwaram. However, he has yet to taste the nectar of success.

“Nine is my lucky number,” he tells businessline, as he gears up for yet another election. Surendran is the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate from Wayanad. There he will face Rahul Gandhi and the Communist Party of India’s Annie Raja when the constituency goes to polls on April 26. Wayanad has always been a Congress bastion, where historically the Left finishes second. Nevertheless, Surendran confidently says, “I will win this time. I know the people’s pulse and their language. This is also the place where I started political activism 35 years ago.”

A few days before this, taking a dig at the incumbent MP Rahul Gandhi, Surendran said, “Wild elephants visited Wayanad more often than Gandhi.” Adding on to that, he said, “Wayanad is a hilly, backward constituency with a lot of tribal population. What did he (Gandhi) do for Wayanad? He is not coming here, talking to people or doing anything for them.”

Surendran calls the upcoming election an ideological fight between the NDA and the INDIA bloc. “Their leader, Rahul Gandhi, is against India’s development. And I am against his negative politics,” he says. He also said that Wayanad deserves a leader who stays with them and not a national leader like Annie Raja, who travels across India. “I have a permanent visa here. The others, on the other hand, have a visiting visa,” he jokes, adding that the voters in Wayanad will follow what Amethi residents did in 2019 and make way for the BJP.

While Surendran refuses to make a detailed comment on the electoral bond issue, calling it a mechanism to get rid of black money, he has strong opinions on the Citizenship Amendment Act. “CAA is not for snatching someone’s citizenship. It is for giving citizenship to persecuted minorities. We have a lot of people from religious minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh living in India. We must offer them asylum,” he adds. 

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