With a resounding 'No' by Kerala and Tamil Nadu, BJP may find it difficult to expand

With South India once again obstructing BJP's expansion plans beyond North and the Northeast, the saffron party will have to look for some new narrative, new strategies to expand its footprint in new catchment areas----the states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and West Bengal.

The challenge is all the more daunting for the BJP as it has reached a saturation point in most states of North and the Northeast including Uttar Pradesh with 80 Lok Sabha seats, where it got nearly 50 per cent votes in last Lok Sabha polls. In Gujarat, BJP won all 26 Lok Sabha seats and over 62 per cent of total votes in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, while in MP its vote share was 58 per cent.

In other growth possibility states, it has lost crucial ally in Maharashtra and Punjab, while in Bihar it cannot grow much without taking the risk of losing a government and going on its own

Read: Post-poll violence shakes Bengal; BJP to hold nationwide protest on May 5

Hence, the outcome in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in this round of Assembly polls, coming after its poor show in Andhra Pradesh in the last Lok Sabha poll, puts a challenging situation to the saffron party.

In Kerala, the BJP lost its lone seat in Nemom won by party veteran O Rajagopal in 2016. It also failed to win Palakkad from where it had fielded "Metro Man" E Sreedharan, hoping to catch the imagination of the educated middle class there after having repeatedly failed to score anything big in elections so far even after organising several political yatras, a result-giving strategy of BJP in elections elsewhere.

BJP had identified 10 constituencies as first class constituencies, hoping to pull out victory and emerge as a third force. BJP which had got only 6.3 per cent votes in Kerala in 2011 Assembly polls, increased its vote share to 16 per cent in 2016 state polls. In 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP-led NDA though could not win any of the 20 seats, it secured a vote percentage of 15.64 per cent, which was an increase of 2.8 per cent from what it had got in 2014 Lok Sabha polls. This time, the BJP got 11.3 per cent votes.

The state has stonewalled all attempts of the BJP to grow beyond a point. In 2017, Shah as BJP president had launched a fortnight long "Janrakshya Yatra" from the hotbed of political violence Kannur to highlight the "killing" of BJP and RSS workers allegedly by the Leftists and the "Jehadi forces". Clearly this is not working

In Tamil Nadu the BJP got a dismal 2.63 per cent votes this time and won four seats in alliance with AIADMK. This was a further decline from 3.57 per cent votes the BJP had got in 2016 assembly polls. In 2014 Lok Sabha, BJP had a vote share of 5.5 per cent and had won one seat.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP contested on five seats in Tamil Nadu, scored a duck and had a lead in only one assembly segment. BJP had taken great efforts to bring the warring EPS and OPS factions of AIADMK together but even the united AIADMK won only one seat and political analysts blamed it partially on "anti-Modi sentiments" in the state.

A win for NRC-BJP alliance in Puducherry is a good news for BJP, which has got 13.66 per cent votes and six assembly seats. Whether it serves a gateway for the BJP to the deep South like Assam did for it for the rest of Northeast is in the womb of future.

Its another hope is now in Telangana, where it won four Lok Sabha seats in 2019 and got over 19 per cent votes in less than six months after it had lost in 100 assembly seats in the state in state polls and secured only 7.1 per cent votes, which was four per cent less than what it had got in 2013 state polls there.

But neighbouring Andhra Pradesh has firmly shut its doors to BJP. In the 2019 Andhra state polls there, BJP contested 175 seats but could not win even one and secured less than one per cent votes. In Lok Sabha polls too, the BJP contested on 25 seats but won zero seats with less than one per cent votes. In 2014 it had won two Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh. By 2019 its vote share fell by 7.5 per cent.

BJP's ambitious plan to win 100 of 205 Lok Sabha seats from the coastal belt and southern states in 2019 general elections was only partially fulfilled with good show in West Bengal and Odisha but South, barring Karnataka, remained a distant dream.