Thiruvananthapuram, July 23 Navya Haridas, who contested as the BJP candidate against AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi at the Wayanad Lok Sabha by-election in November last year, was appointed as the new president of the Kerala unit of the Mahila Morcha, the women’s wing of the BJP, on Wednesday.
36-year-old Haridas, a software engineer by profession, quit her plush job and joined the BJP.
She contested the local body elections in 2015 to the Kozhikode Corporation from the Karaparambu division and won.
In 2020, she retained her seat from the same division.
In the 2021 Assembly polls, she unsuccessfully contested the Kozhikode South Assembly constituency and managed to get only 20.84 per cent votes.
However, her stock rose when she contested against Priyanka, and at the end, even though she lost by a mile, she managed to get 12 per cent of the votes.
Incidentally, in the 2024 general elections, when Rahul Gandhi retained his Wayanad seat, it was the then State BJP president K. Surendran who contested as the BJP candidate and managed to get 13 per cent votes.
So when Haridas contested against Priyanka, she managed to come very close to what Surendran managed to get.
Being an effective two-term local body member, this new elevation is seen as a gift for her hard work.
Incidentally, this new appointment comes at a time when the state BJP unit led by former Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had recently appointed a new state committee, which includes a mix of youth and experience.
During his most recent visit, Union Home Minister Amit Shah asked the state unit to target the local body elections to be held in December and asked the party leadership to ensure that they win two Corporations and 10 municipalities and also increase the BJP vote share to 25 per cent, up from the 16 to 17 per cent they have now.
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