In the last week of March this year, when the Congress party announced the name of Ramya Haridas as it’s official candidate from the Alathur Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala, many brushed it off as an inconsequential move.
For one, the 32-year-old president of a local government body from Kozhikode district was a nobody in the state’s political circles. More importantly, Alathur, a largely rural and agrarian pocket on the eastern border of Kerala with Tamil Nadu, had proved to be a hard nut to crack for the grand old party over the decades. The constituency, reserved for the Scheduled Caste (SC) community, represented the bedrock of solid Communist voters in the state who seldom dared to defy the party.