For all the noise around its Christian outreach, the BJP’s central Travancore gamble has ended without a decisive payoff, delivering pockets of progress but no real electoral breakthrough.
The strategy was clear and aggressively executed. Banking on a carefully crafted outreach to Christian voters, the BJP fielded a line up of prominent Christian faces across key constituencies. Union Minister George Kurian was deployed in Kanjirappally, P.C. George in Poonjar, while State vice-president Shone George and general secretary Anoop Antony were positioned in Pala and Tiruvalla after sustained groundwork.