Qatar resident Parakkal Abdullah will be among the first-time legislators in the 14th Kerala assembly to be formed next month.
The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) candidate won from Kuttiadi in the northern Kozhikode district long held by the rival Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the just concluded elections.
“I have to thank my expatriate friends for this victory. They came from Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait to ensure my win,” Abdullah said by phone from his constituency in the middle of a victory rally.
He defeated CPM’s K K Lathika by a margin of 1,157 votes in a nail-biting finish that saw the fortunes changing after counting of votes cast on each of the 152 electronic voting machines used in different polling stations of the constituency.
He cornered 71,805 votes against Lathika’s 70,652 and 12,327 votes polled by Ramadas Manaleri, the candidate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). P C Baskaran of the Welfare Party of India who got 1,125 votes and Samajwadi Party’s Sabu Kakkattil (860 votes) were also in the race.
“I faced all sorts of allegations during electioneering. They questioned my candidature as an expatriate and even lodged a complaint with the Election Commission against the expats coming to vote,” he told Gulf Times.
“There is at least one expatriate in every family and there are 28,000 expatriate votes here. I won against all odds with their support.”
The legislator-elect who has been doing business in Doha for the past three decades now wants the government to permit absentee voting like in the Philippines instead of insisting on flying home to exercise their franchise.
Abdullah was the general secretary of the Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre. During his term the organization introduced a “security scheme” for expatriates in distress and opened the Qatar chapter of CH Centre for acute patients and those suffering from terminal illness.
Earlier, Manjalamkuzhi Ali, a former resident of Saudi Arabia, and Thomas Chandy of Kuwait, had to give up their Non-Resident Indian (NRI) status to contest the polls before the elections rules were amended in 2012 allowing them to participate in elections while in India.
Ali was a member of the outgoing cabinet of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy.
Both Ali and Chandy have won this time as well.
But Abdullah’s victory, in the face of an anti-incumbency wave against the Chandy government of which the IUML was a part, is even more exciting as Kuttiadi (formerly Meppayur) had never sent a non-Marxist legislator.
This was the third fight of Laithika, wife of CPM district secretary P Mohanan, here. She had won by a margin of 6,972 votes last time.
The CPM is also ruling six of the eight panchayats (local self-governments) in the constituency.
Abdullah won the hearts of the constituency by offering to improve basic infrastructure facilities like roads and drinking water distribution. He also wants to turn Kuttiadi into an education hub.
“People were fed up with political violence here. Development is the solution and I offered just that,” Abdullah said.
He conducted “family meets” across the constituency to take the residents into confidence during the two-and-a-half-month campaigning.